She's So Sweet

She’s So Sweet is a series of sixteen staged photographs rendered in rosy pink tones, harking back to the 1960s ‘model woman’ and housewife. The work revisits the cultural promise that women can “have it all,” a question widely debated in the early 2000s and explored in Virginia Haussegger’s book Wonder Woman (2005). Through parody and staged performance, the images explore the expanding roles women occupy across domestic life, the workplace and contemporary culture.

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In the series we meet the evolved, five-star energy-rated woman—she does it all. She cooks, she cleans, she brings home the bacon, she keeps herself looking good and keeps us connected to our kin. The exhibition begins with the ‘model woman’, dressed in a bodice of piped pink icing and a full skirt decorated with cream swirls, her beehive a mound of melting fairy floss. When the dress is finished, she eats it.

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The artist-as-model then appears in scenes of domestic multitasking bliss. Wearing an apron made of pink gloves suggestive of multiple udders, she bakes pink patty cakes while maintaining crisp domestic ‘service’ with the help of modern appliances. In another image she becomes the contemporary career climber: her white laptop offset by a neat pink business suit made from Chux cloths and a handbag fashioned from bacon.

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The series also reflects my own experience of raising children while building a career and reconsidering the promises of second-wave feminism. At times it felt as though I was simultaneously inhabiting the tropes of a 1950s housewife while striving for financial and professional equivalence.

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The photographs play with these tensions. They evoke a faultless fantasy world while quietly asking how sustainable these expectations really are. Social ideals, like cultural scripts, are continually rewritten on our bodies and our lives. She’s So Sweet explores this process through humour, performance and embodied reflection.