Mutinous Bodies reflects on the experience of living in an unruly body that glitches and disrupts, under attack from within. The disabled experience is often internalised causing isolation, detachment and shame, as well as an insight into impermanence.I selected six autoportraits to develop into photopolymer etchings.

Using an analogue photobooth was a deliberate choice, I didn’t want to author these portraits, so relinquished control to the machine. My aim was to empower the sitter, enabling them to capture themselves. It was a way to disrupt the power dynamic, of Artist: Subject, Doctor: Patient.
The photobooth was the perfect collaborator, glitching and arbitrarily malfunctioning, reflecting the unreliable bodies it captured. I disrupted the process, creating abstracted portraits that obscure the participants’ identities, offering a sense of protection and anonymity. During the process I found the machine was biased to white skin, unable to record the details of darker skin. I deliberately kept this disparity, exposing the medical bias many non-white women face.

Women account for 80% of all autoimmune cases. There is a gender bias in the unknown quality of these illnesses. By confronting the politics of gender, representation and the medically unexplained, I hope to shift topics often surrounded by stigma and shame, bringing them into the cultural conscience.

I developed the work from the temporality of the strips to considered Photopolymer etchings, from throw-away to a carefully crafted artwork, a copper plate, inked by hand and physical imprinted into the paper, from the instant capture of a machine, back to something slow, tender and human.