The Paper Dolls series (2010-ongoing) transforms images from fashion and women’s magazines from the 1980s to the present into a queer representation. Part of the Paper Dolls series, the collage considers how these magazines rely on women’s desire for other women in order to sell their products and lifestyles. Images of women are placed in sexually suggestive queer scenarios of longing, touching, and cavorting. The process of making the works was similar to my childhood experience of playing with paper dolls and limiting my source materials determined the types of images that could be produced.
The overwhelming abundance of colour, textures, objects, and surfaces that make up the backgrounds of the collage is reminiscent of quickly flipping through magazines while the figures enact an imposition of queer desire upon everyone within those pages.