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 set 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.