UNTITLED
My major project is a fictionalised miniature world based in the 1950s exploring themes of traditional domesticity, loneliness, and the mundane.
Using a tableaux style of photography, I created a narrative within a miniature set in 1:12 scale, that allowed me to describe to the audience the story of a 1950s housewife, composited life-sized into her miniature world.
I built and decorated a dollhouse consisting of four separate rooms, each in which I show my character lamenting on her daily life feeling as to repeating the same day over and over again; replicating the traditional 1950s housewife role.
I chose to have this narrative set in the 1950s as it is an era that I am very much drawn to. It is easy to idealise and romanticise the era by looking at Hollywood stars, fashion, and the glamorous lifestyle that is often portrayed in popular culture. However, this was not the reality for the majority of people who lived through the time, and was especially hard for women, who were expected to be solely wives, mothers, and homemakers. The images in this project try to convey that reality of trying to fit into expectations and appearances to be perfect on the outside, yet feeling a deeper longing and displacement under the surface.
This project is important to me as in previous years I have worked with the same character, telling her story through images. Now to have a physical object to go along with it brings so much more realism to her story; a story that is and was a reality for so many women. I feel that making and decorating the house and items within it has brought me so much closer to understanding my character, and will also allow the audience to understand it on a deeper level alongside the images telling the narrative.
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