Après le Bain

​Après le Bain explores the performance of femininity in private spaces through an autobiographical lens, using self-portraiture and still life to recreate sensation-based narratives of gender expression, mental illness, and domesticity. The work documents periods of depression and turmoil, where the safety of the home interior takes on a sinister quality, filled with mess, discarded refuse, or rotting food. The abject is central, evoking visceral responses in viewers—tightening of the gorge, jarring in the gut—drawing them into intimate bodily experiences. Après le Bain focuses on the home bathroom, with cutout paintings draped three-dimensionally over walls and floors, where commercial wellness products act as signifiers of hyper-feminine performance. The material pleasure of figurative painting and colorful consumer objects is disrupted by the abject: menstrual blood, cluttered surfaces, and waxy, scratched textures suggest compulsive rituals, absent bodies, and bodily anxieties. Objects function as costumes in the arcane rituals of femininity, symbolizing collective concerns around desirability, aging, and mortality.