artists

My work explores issues associated with identity and power. To this extent the artwork highlights the individual encounter of non-Caucasian women within postcolonial Australia. Their experiences interrogate contemporary global culture in the context of national and individual identity in Australia today. My art works offer a set of interpretations and analyses of these concerns. The work examines the role of idealised images of female beauty in stating, reflecting and reinforcing social attitudes and institutional priorities. The current ideal of female beauty is determined by a dominant Western culture that defines certain Caucasian physical features of skin colour, body structure and facial characteristics as being ‘more beautiful’ than those of any other. A multiplicity of cultural productions associated with the body, its promotion and apparel reinforce this ideal. Primary research material obtained through a series of participant interviews with women from different races living within Australia have been used as the catalyst for the production of a series of artworks. These artworks critique the interviewee’s comments concerning their exclusion from mediated images of beauty and the numerous pressures each woman felt to conform to western female body ideals.