Ribs is a photo series portraiture project inspired by an original poem called An Ode to Dog and Bone,’ which appropriates Adam’s rib, from which Eve was formed, reimagining it as a metaphor for the historical subservience of women as seen from a Biblical standpoint. Drawing from my experience with religion as a young woman, the work questions this guilt that accompanies intimacy and independence when raised to believe you are innately inadequate. This “inheritance” of inadequacy was explained to me in Sunday school as the wages of sin brought about by women, and thus this idea of ownership and/or belonging to the man as retribution for such.

I’ve found myself both interested in and apalled by imagery of female statues such as Dublin’s Molly Malone or Verona’s Juliet, whose private regions have been touched to the point of patination, revealing how in life, death, and even remembrance women are so often reduced to sexual objects. The visual of gold patina on the female body inversely echoes my own religious shame surrounding intimacy as well as the accompanying notion of being soiled, polluted, or impurified by sexual acts outside of marriage. Thus, this series confronts the sexualization of women through imagery of violation and consumption. By juxtaposing binaries like rigidity/fluidity, dark/light, and most notably purity/pollution, Ribs asks whether the blame for original sin was justly placed, and whether women whose stories have been stripped of their agency can ever be reclaimed.