130 wax pastel on paper - 27x37cm

Female Trouble (titled after John Water's eponymous 1974 film, best described as "an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy") is an ongoing body of work begun in 2019. Taking a film title referencing women as its subject, Female Trouble is a survey of the depiction of the archetypal female through the vehicle of modern cinema and its sensational ‘turns of phrase’.

The drawings themselves take visual cues from the distinctly coloured, high-contrast subtitles of the multilingual Australian broadcaster SBS; maintaining a consistent colour scheme across all panels, whilst individual drawings incorporate the hues of each film’s original title design.

The titles ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, ‘The Devil is a Woman’ and ‘Captive Wild Woman' have one thing in common – they promise to personify the damaged, deranged, and dangerous… woman.

 Female Trouble is a project that comprises multiple components. These components include over 130 wax pastel drawings, a large-scale synthetic polymer painting, a cardboard and wax ‘mouth of a cave’, a wearable textile work taking inspiration from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising motorcycle jacket (the original Camp aesthetic creator) and a written essay on gender in cinema based on Sontag’s interpretation of Plato's theory of the cave and Roland Barthes semiotics of how these have been communicated to the viewer.