Arts Thread

Sarah Jane Hender plays with ideas of gender, what is visually perceived as a gender type, and the physical aspects that can trigger gender recognition. Reiterating images taken from various sources that challenge these perceptions. She then channels a type of essence from faces and bodies, seeking to capture and subvert the real figure into one that sits within an unreal space. Often blurring the lines between real narratives, self-experience, and the imaginary space between. The titles of the work are often taken from a songs, of which she will forcibly over listen to whilst painting, alluding to a trace like state, mirroring the faces that peer back from the image source. Her attraction to female masculinity and the blurring of identity, where the masculine and feminine collide, are areas of inspiration, gender transitioning and representational tropes.Hender's work stems from her early obsession with images, transpiring into a compulsion to fetishize the body and face in its perfection. Taken from iconic silver screen goddesses to music videos and glossy magazines, where the body image is glorified. Due to female objectification, as a young women, she and her friends would gather to admire the torso of a model whose shape made them feel inadequate. But beyond the veneer of photographs and images, Hender would become fascinated by the stories beneath the image, encapsulated by the ones of loss, sorrow and the idea of damaged goods, where the surface of perfection was altered by the reality of the human condition.