‘Lady Things’: Surreal Portraits of Femininity

For Lady Things, Toronto-based photographer Robyn Cumming creates surreal portraits of femininity, replacing the heads and faces of her female subjects with soft, delicate objects. Against quaint patterned wallpapers, frilly curtains, or ominous blackness, the stiffly posed figures are veiled like strange brides in flower petals, luxurious fabrics, and a flock of doves. Though observably of varying ages, the women become uncannily interchangeable with one another.

Neither living nor entirely inanimate, the female bodies are transmuted into domestic props, as docile beings that might awake at any moment from their frozen slumber. Even as she seduces us with a rosy complexion of the smoothest silk, this archetypal woman also promises a sinister sort of decomposition that lingers just outside the frame in which she so innocently stands.

Discover More