Genre Scenes, gender reversed

This series reassigns the gendered archetypes of nineteenth century genre painting, the seamstress, the washerman, the ragpicker, to bodies that historically never occupied them. Painted against a black background with contemporary clothing, gender is treated as a construction repeated until it looks natural, rather than a fixed division of labour or desire. Drawing on painters from Millet to Fragonard and on myths from Tiresias to Phyllis and Aristotle, each canvas asks how much of what feels inevitable about gender roles is simply habit.