Linsey Gosper - Object Love

Object Love, Linsey Gosper’s series of photographic self-portraits, features an array of female personas based on conventional versions of femininity. Using humour and gentle subversion, her works explore alternative views of ‘woman’, providing a more contradictory, fluid, and liberating understanding of the construct.

The portraits are set in an ordinary backyard, with a green lawn, corrugated iron shed, garden gnomes and roses. It is not the place we’d expect to encounter these transgressive characters. Amongst this domestic setting Gosper’s personas act up various roles - femme fatale, virgin, gold-digger. They brandish the tools of domesticity - mops, vacuums, garden hoses, but we can’t understand these characters as merely domestic. In Domestic Python for instance, Gosper takes symbolism into her own hands. Instead of a snake, symbol of power and sexuality, she has a vacuum cleaner coiled snake-like around her neck, thus providing the drudgery of housework with an erotic charge and disturbing any easy assumptions.

Photographic self-portraiture has been used by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun as a tool for feminist enquiry and empowerment. In the same vein, Gosper creates and controls the way her ‘women’ are depicted and consumed. With the shutter release cord clearly visible in the photographs, Gosper wants us to remember she is in control.

Linsey Gosper is a Melbourne based artist and curator working predominately with photography and installation. In broad terms, her practice investigates the construction of identity and of the construction of the image itself. Linsey recently curated Contemporary Landscapes at the Colour Factory Gallery in Fitzroy, where she is currently the gallery manager. She has a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of Art, University of Melbourne and has exhibited extensively at artist run, regional and commercial galleries in Australia. Her work is in the University of Newcastle collection and private collections.