Slimy, Luscious, and Beautiful: Maisie Cousin's Feminine Garden
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Women have long been muses for artists. From The Birth of Venus, Mona Lisa to Girl with a Pearl Earring, women’s elegance and grandeur are praised from generation to generation. But what London photographer Maisie Cousins praises through her lens are grass-covered slimy bodies and make-up gleaming faces. Models lie naked between bright flowers. Slugs crawl slowly across their faces. In another series, glittered fruits float in colorful jelly. For Cousins, this is how real women are, bold and voluptuous.
Welcome to Cousin’s sweet and eccentric Garden of Eden.
23-year-old Cousins has been blogging photos since 15 as a means to escape school. After graduation, she returned to London and started making nonstop. Her experimental and performative practice eventually got noticed by several major media, including Tate Britain Gallery, Petra Collins, and Dazed. These practices involve dipping her hands inside jellies of moist petals and shrimps. “I’m often drawn to things I can get my hands on, I love to be able to make a mess and document it,” she explains in an interview. Wandering through markets, candy shops, and grocery stores, her goal isn’t her next meal but a scavenger hunt of exciting ideas.”I love edible things and textures that the viewer would want to touch or taste. It's nice to take a photo that you enjoyed the experience of taking.“ Cousins’s charm is definitely something unfamiliar to the aesthetic that was taught in school. “I’ve really, really tried to stop being so lurid. At uni I thought, ‘Oh shit, I want people to take me seriously as an artist, I should use serious colors’. And I couldn’t.” Fortunately, her works are a captivating contrast to the general perception that this generation is boring and dull.
“I’m obsessed with shooting nature with disgusting things because I think it’s impossible to make nature look ugly,” she muses. Her obsession includes an abundant appearance of naked bodies. Cousins disgusts over-purify images of female bodies on mainstream media. “Our bodies are living, breathing, slimy entities… They’re not polite objects,” she points out. Under society’s body norm, nudity is often distorted into abnormal objects. Cousins’s gaze normalizes disgusting taboos — fluids like sweat and snot — and returns them from their audience to their owners.
For Cousins, taking pretty photos is never a thing to worry about. "What’s the point of taking a nice picture? There is no need for me to appeal to nice – I’m not making an advert for a perfume! I’m not interested in nice things; I like grossing myself out.” Though disdained to create pretty images, her shots are colorful like candy wrappers. Cousins not only breaks the taboo of gazing at disgusting stuff but admires and celebrates flaws and grossness.
The portrayal of female bodies has thousand years of history, but their contour and display have scarcely different styles. Under Cousins’s lens, models demonstrate a different attitude by being comfortable in their own skin. In addition to showcasing the raw being of women, Cousins has her unique style of enjoying and delivering feminine pleasure. In the series S.E.X and What Girls Are Made Of, flowers, lipstick, glitter and eyelash extensions delightfully drift in gaudy fluids.
Maisie Cousins’s works take us on a visceral and repulsive trip, digging deeper below the skin and exploring what most female-based photographers would rather avoid. In her vibrant and blissful garden, her images praise nature’s intrinsic beauty and, in a rousing gesture, challenge her audience’s comfort zone. No matter how feminine photography will alter in the future, there’s one thing we can be sure of — that Cousins will continue to shock any biased impression on femininity with her unique and bewitching creation.
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