Size: 150cm x 120cm

Eloise has spent the last fourteen years living in South Africa, a country where women’s issues are seen as a woman’s issues. In her new body of work, she has dug deeper into her own female experience and how she can further reflect on her emotions and conscious and unconscious subtleties of her experience in Third World country.

How does the female gaze from a Third world perspective change in a First World Setting? Eloise constantly finds herself comparing her experience living in Pretoria and Johannesburg to the almost naive existence of living in the United Kingdom, speaking to women from South Africa who are incredibly open and honest about their experience and superimposing these emotions of unease, fear, and hyper-awareness these women and Eloise herself has faced onto images of women in the UK. By manipulating subtleties such as colour and contrast, she changes the dialogue from just being a third world experience to a universal one.

After an experience of a man assaulting her while walking home one night in Plymouth, UK, Eloise has decided to transition her voyeuristic approach to her paintings to show her direct relation to her subject. Coming to a firm conclusion that the lack of respect for women and their bodies is not a just third world problem but a universal societal problem.