the grotesque feminine
The Grotesque Feminine examines how the female body becomes monstrous when it refuses to conform to idealised, ornamental versions of beauty. My work combines femininity and abjection by deliberately merging visual languages and materials associated with beauty, softness, and delicacy (feminine aesthetics) with imagery and textures that evoke discomfort, bodily distortion, and disgust (the grotesque or abject). This merging creates a tension between attraction and repulsion, elegance and horror, self and other.
Monstrous forms emerge through abstract prints and warped imagery, designed to be worn. When placed on the body, these pieces transform the female wearer into the monster herself—blurring the boundaries between subject and spectacle, and turning the grotesque into a living, breathing performance. This transformation disrupts the gaze, reclaiming power through confrontation and embodiment.
Influenced by theorists including Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin, the project considers the grotesque body as excessive, fluid and resistant to containment. It interrogates the ways patriarchal culture demonises aspects of women’s physicality, particularly those linked to sexuality, ageing, reproduction, and bodily functions, by framing them as unnatural or shameful.
Rather than offering a softened or ornamental version of femininity, The Grotesque Feminine embraces the visceral, shape-shifting and transgressive. It invites the viewer to linger in a space where beauty and monstrosity merge, and where the grotesque becomes a language for feminist resistance and reimagination.
Beginning with macro photographs of the female body, these are magnified until they lose their original context. The images are layered, merged, and distorted to create new grotesque forms, bodies within bodies. Over this, wax and latex are poured, coating the surface in a skin-like film that simultaneously conceals and exposes. The process evokes disgust, abjection, and repulsion, invoking the physicality of the body while making it strange.
Yet these forms do not remain fixed in their abject state. Through reworking, re-editing, and re-scaling, they are transformed once more into pattern or print, emerging as something ornamental, even beautiful. This cyclical process, body to grotesque and grotesque to beauty, questions the stability of both categories. It asks whether beauty can truly be separated from discomfort, and whether the grotesque is simply another face of the decorative.
The work draws on parasitic forms, structures that feed, cling, and transform their host, to explore how beauty can emerge from discomfort. In these prints, growth is never passive; it is invasive, entangling itself with the body until the two can no longer be separated. Patterns spread across the surface like infections or blooms, their delicate shapes masking a sense of unease.
This aesthetic deliberately unsettles the boundary between attraction and repulsion. What appears ornamental is also consuming; what seems fragile is also tenacious. The parasitic becomes a metaphor for the way femininity is often framed as both alluring and dangerous, desirable and contaminating. In wearing these pieces, the body becomes both host and participant in a living, visual takeover, an act that transforms discomfort into a strange, inescapable beauty.
the female becomes the monster,
the parasite becomes the host.
Photography not my own and used for visualisation purposes only.
When beauty and disgust share the same skin,
which do you see first?