Consider Her Ways
– The Twilight Girls, collaboration Helen Hyatt-Johnston & Jane Polkinghorne
3m x 2m inkjet vinyl poster. Exhibitions: We are Family, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney 2024, and Raygun Projects Toowoomba, 2014.
Consider Her Ways, 2014. Inkjet print on vinyl, 2m x 3m. The Twilight Girls (Jane Polkinghorne & Helen Hyatt-Johnston
Consider Her Ways shows mono-gendered fungal-like monstrosities of erupting areolas, gestating glands and breasts giving birth to bodies and heads. The work interrogates, questions and parodies the idealised nuclear family, messing with the panic and hysteria that periodically surrounds same sex families in mainstream media.
The title of this work comes from Consider Her Ways, a 1956 science fiction story by the English writer, John Wyndham, where human intervention appears to have resulted in dire consequences. In echoing billboard advertising and promotion, the image is an examination of the grotesque possibilities of a world where reproduction, living and being occurs with the absence of men. Consider Her Ways overtly references representations of women in science fiction and horror story lines as parody but also for the genuine cultural horrors that the presence of the monstrous feminine holds and haunts in science fiction, fantasy and mythology.
In this work, The Twilight Girls used and manipulated negative and revolting imagery with forceful affect. This is an ugly, brutal, yet ridiculous and humorous brandishing of the powers of the breast and female reproductive capabilities and continues The Twilight Girls’ exploration into the potentialities of horror in feminine representation.