The portraits in “Home Maid” and “ Mujer Casa” are representations I construct to question my sense of personal and social self as a woman. Even though I am the subject of the photographs, I don’t think of them as self-portraits. These photographs explore women’s relation to their bodies, the house, household objects and housework. They are an exercise in exploratory subjectivity.
I am interested in questioning the various roles of a woman in society: mother, daughter, professional, housewife, prostitute, virgin, etc. and in framing represented ideas associated with these roles as ambiguous and unfixed. We recurrently fall into pre-established gender patterns and don’t even question how repressive those can be. Through my photographs I seek to challenge normative gender roles and expectations, as well as ideas of beauty and the body.
In “Mujer Casa” I use the house as a framework, exploring this quintessential phenomenological object (Gaston Bachelard) while at the same time interacting with humor at the haphazard encounters with objects and spaces of the house.
In “Home Maid”, on the other hand, I use a plain background and deal with my personal relationship to the body, to ideas of gender and to the expectations of the various roles inherited and learned as a woman. In this series I often use sculptures or objects I constructed by hand.
All images are archival pigment print on hahnemühle paper
cm 160 x 120 and 70 x 50 cm