A Fine Balance

To say that my life as a female artist is a finely tuned balancing act is perhaps a cliché. The work/family dichotomy of modern life is commonplace and, as many other women have already discovered, domesticity and creativity can be difficult to reconcile. In this series I attempt to capture the fine balance that is my life. I have constructed these images with objects that represent the different forces in my life: from banal domestic objects to sentimental personal objects, to objects used in my creative work. These objects are arranged in a column structure which is placed on top of books that are in turn balanced on my head. The use of books as the base of these columns recalls the posture lessons that young girls, myself included, had to practice. The stacks of objects, precariously and incredibly posed, reflect the difficulty of this balancing act of the multi-tasking modern woman. Although these images are constructed post-production, it is important conceptually, that they remain credible and realistic.

The series continues with portraits of other women. Although the concept remains the same, here there is a collaboration with the subject, above all in the choice of objects which are used to represent the various forces in their lives: home, family, work. As in the self-portraits, the subject’s back is turned towards the camera so that the photo is read through the composition of objects without the distraction of the subject’s face.