Utopia and Dystopia (2021)
Throughout history women have been portrayed in painting as divine creatures equated with nature and within it as symbols of madness, pleasure, divinity, and other archetypes that seem mystical and at times somewhat positive. However, the equation of woman as nature in painting has been a tool to 'other' women within patriarchal discourses. These aspects are both utopian and dystopian at once, recognizing women as exceptional while also trapping her within those narratives; when portrayed as divine in nature, women can be divine, but nothing more. Each Utopia and Dystopia painting mimics the representations of women within Henri Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905) and John Everett Millais' Ophelia (1851-52) as trapping and indistinguishable from nature, and therefore 'other'.
