These images reflect moments of empowerment that could only take place in the comfort of a private space, challenging the norms of visual representation of the female body. With moments of enveloping, resisting, restraining, and energizing, these portraits invite scrutiny not of the body, but of its relationship to its context. Working with the body as a physical structure that both protects and makes vulnerable, I focus on instances in which this duality is broken. External forces rupture the surface; interior forms puncture through peripheral constraints. These figures protest the dynamics that construe any conception of the inhabitant as the sole, powerful agent of her own body.
