Kiera Comfort

My practice explores using the landscape as a stage for performance through orienting the terrain to challenge ritualism and endurance of the female nude. 

The work delves into video and photography as a medium to explore the desexualisation of the nude through ritualism, endurance, and discomfort. The endurance of the figure becomes prominent through the risky environment of the public sphere, and further in the rigorous environment and climate. By decontextualising the body, the public nature of performances enhances risk and vulnerability. This permits an embodied experience; this exposure is integral to questioning the gaze in the rigorous environment. This aims to interrogate the dynamics of spectatorship, challenging the figure’s presence and questioning the female gaze through contemporary visual culture.

 

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The landscape is orientated and trekked through in search of height and dramatisation, creating an oscillation between landscape and figure through a female gaze perspective. The landscape decontextualises the figure from the photographic studio where it has previously been eroticised, turning the posed image into one of performity.

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