The Body Is A Situation

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project” ― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
 

The Body Is A Situation, a solo exhibition by Caroline Stephen, presents a series of photographs that explore the complexities of gender, identity, and self-construction through self-portraiture. The Body Is A Situation positions the body as something both experienced and performed – a site where identity is constantly negotiated. In this work, Stephen steps into the role of six hyper-feminine caricatures. These personas, drawn from media tropes and real-world archetypes, became tools for the artist to investigate the intersection of performance and reality. Through costume, gesture, and artifice, Stephen interrogates the visual language of femininity and the ways in which women are both shaped by and complicit in their own cultural representations.

In this work, Stephen stages a series of incomplete transformations through the use of saturated color, oversized prosthetics, synthetic wigs, and false teeth. She appears as a showgirl, a pioneer, a beauty queen, a nun, but the performances never fully settle into illusion. Instead, the constructed nature of each character remains visible: the seams are left exposed. What emerges is a body of work that is at once humorous, uncomfortable, and sincere. Stephen’s images exist in the space between mimicry and self-portraiture, where adopting the guise of another becomes a mirror – distorted, but revealing. In the process of becoming someone else, the artist exposes the fragments of herself that remain beneath the surface, confronting the lingering impact of trauma, the instability of self-image, and the blurred boundary between who she is and who she’s been told to be.