In this body of work I aim to celebrate familiar iconographies of historical female social culture and performance including references to the ballet, masquerade and cinema. I have chosen to use theatrical gestures and intensely saturated, often dissonant colour combinations because my personal interpretation of a possible notion of contemporary femininity is not dainty, weak or tasteful, but colourfully aggressive, ferociously whimsical and dramatically excessive. The montage of imagery and painting styles in my work is intended to be a staging of the overlapping cultural influences that define this sense.

My research has focused on beauty, exploring the fairy-tale genre and society’s negative attitudes toward stereotypes of girlhood (in the writings of Marina Warner), on feminist gender identity theory (Judith Butler), the aesthetics of camp sensibility’s artifice and exaggeration (Susan Sontag) and the association of colour with the feminine throughout art history (David Batchelor); among the artists engaging with these visual elements are Fiona Rae, Karen Kilimnik and Beatriz Milhazes. I believe it is my prerogative to claim the symbols that define my interpretation of femininity in the context of contemporary art practice—in the words of Diana Vreeland, ‘Everything is interpretation!’