Aurora Way

︎ @auroraphotographic

︎ www.auroraphotographic.com

︎ info@auroraphotographic.com

The ‘Considered Selfies’ series began as a daily challenge to create a self-portrait everyday during the 2020-21 lockdowns. This functioned as an incentive to keep creating and to find some gratification amongst periods of otherwise empty isolation. I networked the series daily on Instagram because I wanted to connect with my community through colour and play, at a time of dark uncertainty. As it grew, it served as a reminder that we didn’t need external people or places to empower ourselves.

Cultural historian and social critic Christopher Lasch described in his book ‘The Culture of Narcissism’ that under certain circumstances that fracture the social constructs from which we derive our sense of individuality, it makes sense to “live only for the moment, to fix our eyes on our own ‘private performance’, to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate a ‘transcendental self-attention.’” With lockdown causing similar conditions, I found myself playing this role through an intense, ent

hralling ritual of self-observation. I set out with the intention to isolate a manner from which I could represent myself as a woman, and as an artist, through a series of playful selfies that would be networkable in function, but intimate, self-empowering and authentic in nature.

The images are ingrained with my internalised self, although finalised with a romanticised commercial aesthetic derived from The Renaissance; a period of art history that saw so few female artists. T

o represent the counter-ideal, I produced a series of intimate screen-recordings of my ritual process. It is in the video-work that you may see the core nature of the series; the intrinsic, self-obsessed, self-observing and hypnotic reality of a female artist during mass periods of isolation.