Tiffany Winterbottom

Homegroan Girls
5 to 31 August 2005

This series of digital cutout works developed from my fascination with the bad girl stereotype in popular culture. The works evolved from digital photographs taken during photo shoots with girlfriends being ‘bad’ around the house. Bad girls acting out their web porn fantasies are depicted within everyday domestic surroundings.

Through devices like digital photography, home computers and Internet access, women can explore, deconstruct and play with their own ‘image’. This marks a significant change in the history of the ‘pin up girl’ and the influence and domination of the male gaze on the female sexual aesthetic. Previously guys would send photos of their girlfriends into trashy magazines like Picture. But now in their own surroundings ordinary girls are both posing for the camera and taking the photographs. This self-exploration and reclaiming of sexuality is even more prominent on the Internet with websites like suicidegirls.com and digitalgirly.com.

I cast my girlfriends as bad girls while I take on the role of photographer/director. The hilarious photo shoots are usually held after a few drinks, either at my own house or at a friends. We live in rental accommodations known for their particular look; clutter, dodgy worn carpet, photo collages on the fridge and milk crate furniture. It’s these dodgy objects that are captured in the background that lead to the blurring of boundaries between their real lives and the soft porn guise of the bad girl persona that we take on for the evening.

The works are suggestive of pop artist Andy Warhol and the approach he used when layering the hand drawn outline with the photographs of his friends posing in the factory. While the works in homegroan girls also aspire to achieve

‘Warhol’s Pop way of seeing [which] enabled him to feel like an insider, to reinhabit and reinvent the image world around him… It was nonetheless a way of seeing that allowed him to recognize his friends and in so doing to make his daily news a little less sad a little more sexy1.

Tiffany Winterbottom
July 2005

1 Flatley J, 'Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the politics of Prosopopoeia' in J Doyle, J, Flately, J, Munoz, Pop Out Queer Warhol, London, Duke University Press, 1996, p 128

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