Fantasies of Liberation, 2018, collage, 23 x 29cm

Images of female nudes appropriated from a vintage magazine are merged with imagery from a secondary school astronomy manual. These bodies—originally staged to communicate desire and beauty—are rendered uncertain, no longer a stable surface but something porous, in flux, and unresolved.

Ideal bodies in ideal landscapes are corrupted, interfered with, and displaced from their original function. The obscuring of the face—replaced by cosmic imagery—shifts the figure from an object of recognition into something unknowable and expansive.

These works were made soon after a childfree holiday, an attempt to escape from the responsibilities of being a mother to a young child. In a hut near a remote beach in Uruguay, a poster on the wall contained information about the cosmos. A few weeks later, I found both the vintage magazine and the astronomy book in a street market in Montevideo.