My practice takes the form of a mixed media response – primarily through film and photography – to the notion of the fetish commodity. My work explores the parallels between fetish objects in home, the perception of the selfand aesthetic arrangements as simulations of Identity. Using props and positioning to make staged scenes, I perform gendered rituals of middle-class domesticityusing the objects that make up the domestic space. Through a playful explorationof images of lifestyle idealism, Idraw attention to and exaggerateelements of popular material and visual culture to create a richly textured image.

Though photographing myself, I am presented not as an individualbut as a character.Using the title ‘A Woman’,I represent the expectations of womenthrough archetypal examples – a woman who is performing for the purpose of being seen. Femininity as an abstract concept is bound to the sensuousness and passivity of consumable objects; an object of desire or a state in flux. In discourse, the Freudian notion that the commodity fetish is the castrated phallus of the woman is dismissed as phallocentric. The objects surrounding The Woman,as well as those she has used to decorate herself with, instead perform as replacements for the sexual through a tactile sensuousness; the touch, sight, sound, of their material quality. 

The reductive nature of these works – in the sense that the behaviours performed are stereotypical – is pertinent to the process of transformation into the ideal. The woman is elevated to level of symbolic. As John Berger has written, the use of trope in digital imagery are a replication of both feminine passivity and stereotype in the European trajectory of painting, such as that of the allegoricalJudgement of Paris. Women are posed as the fetish commodity within the tangiblephysical texturing of these markers of wealth and status. A woman who knows she is seen but cannot evade your gaze. Unmovable within an artwork to be owned. 

My practice explores the ontology of the woman as an object in work that has been produced to exist within the financialised art market. Amelia Jones has written of the artist as a commodity fetish whose image is circulated as commodity fetish within network of global capitalism – the system that sustains contemporary art – as cultural item alongside the work they produce. I, as the artist, am acting out the role of fetish commodity so that the work can become a commodity object.