Pageant Girl

This collection of images of unhappy clown ladies morphing into their own reflections explores ideas of self in the digital world. Each figure is caught between traumatic embodiment and artifice, like an eternal children’s birthday where one is both clown and child. Doll-like and tragic, these portraits tell a story of being caught in time with intergenerational traumas, and the beauty that can be found there – while also remaining digitally manifested imagery that inhabits the landscape of social media, where our self-image, relationships and politics are owned and controlled by others. They hide behind the badly painted masks to reveal something more real than a selfie.