Naomi C, 2025
Polystyrene foam, fiberglass, automotive paint
123 cm x 104 cm x 72 cm
Artist’s Statement
POSE/SSED emerges from my experience working in the fashion and magazine industry, where I participated in constructing idealised representations of women. My practice examines the contradictions between the appearance of effortless beauty and the visual systems that sustain it.
Rather than sculpting the female body, I reconstruct the negative space surrounding it. By materialising the unseen points of tension and support that hold a fashion pose in place, the sculptures become reverse-engineered inversions of the gaze. They reveal the hidden labour, instability, and bodily contortions required to perform beauty ideals, transforming absence into form.
Naomi C is carved from polystyrene, a material that parodies the permanence and authority of classical marble. Where marble signifies timeless beauty, polystyrene exposes the artificiality, fragility, and toxicity underpinning contemporary ideals of femininity. The sculptures are reinforced with layers of fibreglass and LR30 resin, whose smooth, seductive surface conceals an abrasive material that irritates the skin, reflecting the tension between beauty’s allure and its hidden discomfort. Finished in high-gloss automotive paint, the sculptures acquire the polished, consumable sheen of luxury objects while referencing the culture of “panel beating” in fashion retouching, where bodies are digitally slimmed and perfected.
Drawing on the enduring figure of Aphrodite of Milos, POSE/SSED interrogates how ideals of feminine beauty persist from classical sculpture to fashion photography and contemporary digital culture. Through these material inversions, the work exposes beauty not as a timeless ideal but as a disciplinary system embedded within visual culture.
1The title Pose/ssed plays on the dual meaning of the pose as both performance and possession, reflecting my position as both participant in and critiquing fashion’s representational apparatus.
