WOMEN OF THE LANDSCAPE
2013
Women of the Landscape is a portraiture project that reimagines the representation of women within historical landscape paintings by renowned male artists. Traditionally, landscape painting has been a male-dominated genre. In this series, I disrupt that convention by introducing feminine figures into these landscapes, challenging the genre’s norms and expanding its boundaries. The women, photographed in a studio setting with a large format camera, are digitally inserted into scanned versions of the paintings, carefully selected from various monographs. I aim to create new interpretations of these original works, reclaiming historically masculine spaces and rebelling against the established canons of art history. In contrast to their passive roles in traditional landscape paintings, the women in my portraits dominate the frame, appearing as strong, commanding figures that demand attention. Each woman inhabits the landscape with a compelling presence and assertive demeanour.
Although my work has always drawn rich painterly references from the canons of art history, for this project, I focused on landscape artists whose work portrays nature more dramatically and emotionally. In Women of the Landscape, I explore different permutations of the female figure within nature, engaging directly with the landscape paintings of male artists. The works of Caspar David Friedrich, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Antoine Watteau, John Constable, Thomas Hotchkiss, Asher B. Durand, Jean Honoré Fragonard, and others were chosen for their use of colour, palette, light, and emotional resonance. Great care was taken in selecting the ideal model for each scene. I wanted the subjects to seamlessly inhabit these spaces, creating contemporary versions of the historical images while referencing the societal role of women during the periods in which the original paintings were created.
By embodying historical and contemporary representations of femininity—without resorting to cliché—my goal was to establish a strong female presence within the work of famous male artists. The integration of women into these landscapes was based on the physiognomy and emotionality of each subject, as well as the formal qualities, mood, and physical space of each painting. Women of the Landscape interrogates the genres of portraiture, romanticized landscape, and gendered space.
