Freedom is Plastic is a photographic series made using macro photography and found fashion magazines.
For each image, I photographed small objects and materials at close range against cropped sections of fashion photographs taken from magazines. Rather than using the magazine image simply as a background, I composed the photographs so that the physical object and the printed image begin to interact, creating a new and sometimes ambiguous visual space.
Working at macro scale disrupts the original proportions of both elements. Details that would ordinarily be overlooked become enlarged, while fragments of bodies, clothing and fashion imagery are removed from their original context. The boundary between the photographed object and the photograph behind it becomes deliberately unstable.
The series developed from my interest in the constructed language of fashion imagery and the promises of identity, beauty and freedom that surround it. By introducing physical materials into these highly controlled representations, the works interrupt the seamless surface of the fashion photograph.
The resulting images sit between still life, fashion photography and collage, although the compositions are constructed in front of the camera rather than assembled afterwards. What appears at first to be a single image is a photograph of one visual world placed physically against another.
