The Manifest

"The Manifest": clouding our binary ideas of gender. The definition of the word Manifest describes what a thing ( a boat, a person, a vessel) may hold i.e the contents of. This series reflects on gender identity and the role contemporary photographic portraiture plays in the representation of the ‘female’ image. Does it capture or construct identity? Through the constancy and indifference of clouds, I respond to historic, costumed representations of ‘authentic’ gender. In the past, the ephemeral nature of clouds defied scientific classification. Artists saw them as anti-structure, anti-order and representative of the complexity of human mood or aspiration -as transports of gods and angels; signifying the intermediate world between the hidden and the visible. The models’ historical costumes define them as hetero-normative, yet closer inspection reveals the costs of conformity and convention. The clothing and gender conventions they symbolise are restricting and restrictive; the models are depicted in the process of liberation from these constraints - ascendant, carried aloft by the clouds. In the portraits the subjects are unravelling, in an un-grounded escape from the restrictions of their gender-based impositions of ‘authentic’ gender. In some images the model’s anguished face and painted hands mock the grace of her garments . Her feet have all but disappeared -robbed even of locomotion . Some portraits are further disrupted by the balloon which seems to drag her skyward; Egg round, womb like but blood red, it suggests that but for this essential inflated signifier of fertility and femaleness , she might fall to earth, or disappear altogether. A new representation and possibility for an entirely individual identity is asserted, one that seems to be as natural and free-formed as the clouds themselves. Each model celebrates the construction of their re-versioned female self, defying the constriction of corsetry and challenging the traditional classification of gender identity. In “The Manifest” utopia and dystopia symbolically collide to present an alternative vision of the future of gender constructs and limitations. Manifest is a manifesto for new ways of capturing gender in photographic form.