«It started with a purely aesthetic love for classical paintings that ended up spiralling into a semi-erotic wish to destroy them, sublimate them. By re-performing those images, I wanted to position myself as part of a lineage – a history of anonymous, naked girls. Part of that is a desire to re-claim the image, to take it back from the male hand, but I also accept that I am unable to escape the original: we are all followed, haunted, by these representations of girls. They set a standard for femininity that most girls mimic unconsciously every day, that control our understanding of what is beautiful, what is sexy, what is powerful.
So, there’s the pleasure of interruption (of stealing, of smearing) but also of identification and fantasy: I want to be the girl in the painting, I’ve always wanted to be the girl in the painting. By inserting my body into the image, I could jiggle it out from the very strict confines of history, let it breathe a little, and actually look at what was happening there, what those bodies were living through, what ideals they were promising. That gave me a way to think through every kind of image, not just classical paintings but conceptual art of the 1960s, fashion photographs, anime TV shows, etc.«
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