Moira Lovell

Trying to fit and trying to fit in. Phone, hand, gaze, always connected online and to the behaviours of the other. My body reacts and responds to what I see: following selfie-making tutorials, reenacting other people’s selfie gestures, ‘smizes’, ‘finger-mouths’, pronouncing “prawn”, deconstructing and reconstructing the language of the selfie. Yet, prior to this study, I wasn’t much of a selfie-maker, I didn’t have a grasp of the conventions, whilst I was aware of the ‘duck-face pout’, I did not know saying the word “prune” to my camera-phone, would help me master it. In this sense, I am learning through doing by following a particular prosumer-image practice.

Whilst I, the artist, perform for and create video and photographic self-portraits, this research should not be considered as simply about me, rather I work in a knotty entanglement with the pouts and poses of others, specifically women who disseminate selfies on online selling sites. In turn I create self-portraits that are less about representing my likeness, and much more about exposing the performative aspects of the self as converged with, and constructed in relation to, other bodies, both human and photographic.

Combining methods of image-appropriation, humour and unease, I re-enact the image, for the next image, drawing upon a very specific body of imagery sourced from the internet, which I make analogue, perform, and return to the digital as a new model for being – a process and concept I refer to as: ‘the image as a template for posing’. My embodied remixing of images and gestures allows me to rethink the manipulation of images and the desire to perform and become-image.

The artworks created during the course of this research are the foundations for the chapters in the thesis. The first chapter is led by the photographic series Modelling Selfies (in paper outfits) and explores the merging of differently dimensioned bodies to consider some of the labour involved in producing and consuming digital images. The second chapter begins with a number of protracted video works that sit under the title Gestures (for the selfie), this chapter continues to look at the body’s connections to the image, extending the discussion of labour, whilst examining the desire of living up to an image that is out of reach. This leads to the third and final chapter of the thesis, which commences with the series Fragmented acts and further extends my inquiry into bodies, images and labour, this time focusing on the mutations, transformations and abstractions of the self/image as it passes from one context to the next, traversing new spaces and forms, disturbing its former order, becoming fragmented, seeking alternative perspectives and taking on new meanings.

The broad aim of my inquiry is to determine how women construct, and are constructed by, the image, based on the possibilities suggested by present and everyday modes of digital image making. The image as a template for posing offers a new contribution to contemporary thinking about prosumer ‘self-portraiture’ at the intersections of photography, performance studies and labour.