Second Skin
Every woman knows what it is to live in a body that has been judged. Exposed. Survived.
We add layers. Some get put on us — criticism, labels, stereotypes, trauma, injustices we never asked for. Some we build ourselves — performance, armor, self-doubt. Either way, they settle into the body and stay there until we're ready to look at them.
That's the moment this series lives in.
This isn't the first time I've gone looking for what's underneath. Years ago I made What Is Beauty, photographing women I'd already shot fully glammed, stripped back to nothing, to see if they could feel just as beautiful without the fuss. Then came Bag Ladies, born out of my own experience online dating and feeling reduced to a body — like I might as well have been wearing a bag over my head, since nothing else about me seemed to matter. More recently, Holy Water, exploring release through water and ritual. Each project asked its own question.
Second Skin had been forming in me for a while before I had a name for it. Paris sharpened it the same way it sharpened Holy Water — something already taking shape inside me, made concrete by being somewhere that has spent centuries deciding what belongs on a wall. I came home knowing exactly what I wanted to build.
We hold so much tension in our bodies. Years of it, sometimes, layered on top of each other until we stop noticing it's even there. I wanted to see what it looked like to push back against that — physically, visibly, with hands and fabric and breath. Not gently. Not politely. A real push, against a real weight.
What I watched happen in that studio was the female gaze, in the most literal sense I know how to make it. Not posed for anyone. Not performing anything. I wasn't directing her to look good for the camera. I was directing her toward something truer than that — and watching her find it was one of the most exciting things I've experienced as an artist.
We're still figuring out what the female gaze actually looks like, as a culture. I don't have the full answer either. But I know it when I see it, and I saw it that day.
Playful. A little messy. Experimental and curious. Unbothered. If I'm honest, there's something of a badass in it — a woman who has decided she's done asking permission for how she takes up space.
They say the body keeps the score. I believe that. I also believe the score can be rewritten — not erased, but added to, on purpose, with intention. That's what I think we're doing in that studio. Letting art put a hand on the scale.
I want this series to include every kind of woman. Every body shape, every size, every skin tone, every age, every story a body carries. There's no single way to look like you belong in this work.
Before each session, a woman writes a letter (to herself, to the world, to whoever she needs to address it to) about what her body has carried, what it survived, what she's finally ready to leave behind. She reads it aloud while we work. Her voice becomes part of the piece.
What started as one woman in sheer material in my studio has become something I now believe could be my life's work. I'm making it because I watched a woman become more herself by fighting against something that wasn't, and I think that's worth photographing again and again, with as many women as it takes. I can't wait to see where this goes.
What keeps bringing me back, project after project, is the lives of women — how we move through this world, through culture. What holds us back. How we hold ourselves back. What gets put on us. The roles. The gazes.
If you've ever felt the weight of life’s layers (and I think every woman has) this is an invitation. Please contact me if you would like to be my muse and create art together.
