The Dressing Room

The Dressing Room

Moores, Kate

“The Dressing Room” considers a place of transition where one can be undone, stripped down, and reborn as someone else. It suggests performance, where one’s identity can be modified to fit a character. Beauty has never been more accessible through surgical procedures, GLP-1s, shapewear, extensions, -- so my work is informed by the wider cultural phenomenon of personal optimization. These actions assume that the person underneath the alterations is dull. Rather than approaching that conversation directly, this work offers quiet meditation on the practice through obscuring subjects with less obvious tools. These works explore beauty in unfinished states and what lies between the natural and superficial. Through partially masking the subjects, the focus becomes the individual hidden by artifice. The obscura feels both feminine and fleeting, either elevating the subject or disguising them. Their presence may be central, but the intrigue lies within the background forms. These photos capture a state of in-between, abstract moments of beauty, making them altogether less ‘pretty’. My photographs describe a journey to perfection, updated for the age of technology, but a journey as old as narrative itself.

2026