Working Artist Statement

This work is about the performance of “The Good Girl.” It talks about how she is fabricated, how she operates, how she presents herself, who she’s trying to impress, and the exhaustion of the falsified experience.

“The Good Girl” is not a specific person or set of actions, for it shows up differently in whoever is pulling the strings. For some, it could be a conservative way of dressing that supposedly keeps people from looking at the sexualized body beneath. For other’s it’s a fake smile, put on to keep people from asking the hard questions. It can take the form of perfectionism, with every duck neatly in row to escape an avalanche of critical reactions. Rather then rebelling, “The Good Girl” puts on a performance. Rather then giving up, she puts on more layers.

Nancy Friday discusses the formation of The Good Girl at length in her book The Power of Beauty.

“I believe we all, men and women, give up far more the necessary to fit the ridged standards of adolescence. The biggest mistake I’ve made in life, the roads not taken and opportunities not seized, I am sure, today, might have been avoided if only I’d been able to take into adolescence the girl I’d been prior to it. Reining her in, forcing her to obey the restricting rules by which girls had to live made me acutely self-conscious, overly cautious, unsure of myself, second-guessing everything for the rest of my life. And angry, don’t leave out anger at abandoning myself, teeth-grinding anger that I dutifully swallowed and ‘forgot.’”


In my work, the protagonist takes on the forms of the ballerina and the princess, both of whom are a repository for cultural stigmas on womanhood, filled with expectations of perfectionism, beauty, meekness and grace. Inherent in their job description is a necessity to keep their audience at bay while simultaneously creating a longing for their status and beauty.

I embody both of these characters in order to express my need to be one of them, identifying with the artifice that creates a wide gate around them. In reality, my stage becomes the hallway and the kitchen, the shopping mall and the restaurant. My act is a reveal that shows nothing more than what other people need me to be. The finale shows the princess in a pink dress, breathing heavily, exhausted and humanized, but ready to jump again tomorrow.