Unnatural Women is a series of paintings that stages intimacy between figures that cannot feel it. Two mannequins, posed in an embrace, a kiss, or a state of binding, occupy each composition, their proximity suggesting desire while their surfaces resist it. They are smooth, sealed, and unyielding; their bodies echo the gestures of lovers, yet remain resolutely artificial.

The work draws on a long visual history in which femininity is constructed, displayed, and disciplined. The mannequin, as both object and ideal, becomes a stand-in for the ways women, particularly queer women, have been framed as aesthetic surfaces rather than autonomous subjects. In these paintings, that tension is made explicit: the figures appear intimate, even erotic, but something is always withheld. Their connection is convincing and hollow at once.

The title, Unnatural Women, deliberately invokes the language historically used to marginalize lesbian desire, cast as deviant, theatrical, or unreal. Here, that accusation is both absorbed and inverted. The figures are literally “unnatural”: they are not flesh, not alive, not capable of love. Yet the poses they inhabit are unmistakably human. This contradiction asks: what, exactly, has been considered unnatural, the love itself, or the refusal to recognize it as real?

The series is also informed by a cinematic lineage in which queer female desire has often been mediated through artifice. From the staged interiors of 1970s European cinema to contemporary films set in fashion worlds and controlled environments, lesbian relationships have frequently been framed through performance, stylization, and the transformation of women into images. In these films, the body becomes something posed, directed, or curated, at times echoing the stillness of mannequins, at others collapsing entirely into objects, doubles, or constructed ideals. Unnatural Women translates this visual language into painting: each composition functions like a frozen scene, a moment of heightened intimacy that feels both theatrical and suspended.

In some works, the mannequins seem tender, their forms gently leaning into one another. In others, they are bound, contorted, or staged with an undercurrent of unease. The erotic is present, but it is complicated by rigidity, by the uncanny stillness of bodies that cannot reciprocate touch. The viewer is left to navigate a space where desire is both performed and denied, where intimacy becomes a kind of choreography without sensation.

Ultimately, Unnatural Women is not only about absence, but about projection. These figures hold the shapes of longing imposed upon them, by culture, by history, by the gaze. In their silence, they reflect the persistent framing of lesbian identity as something constructed, aestheticized, or unreal. And yet, in their closeness, they also insist on a presence that cannot be fully erased.