The Body Beyond Her

By Caitlin Abbott - Ecofeminist Photography Collection

Location: ex-Workingmens Club, 107 Cuba St

Dates: July 2025

Property partner: The Wellington Company

This research explores how ecofeminism and architecture intersect, focusing on how both women and nature have been impacted by patriarchal, societal and built systems. It challenges the way architecture often reflects societal power structures and asks how design can become more equitable and ecologically sensitive by embracing ecofeminist principles and understandings.

Photography was employed as the main research method, offering a visual and embodied way to explore the deep connection between women and the natural world. Through the photography of 50 women engaging with nature - in states of vulnerability, authenticity and reflectance - the project aimed to reclaim space, challenge traditional norms, and highlight shared female experiences. Inspired by John Berger's idea that nakedness can express the self rather than expose it, the work presents the body as powerful and present, rather than passive or objectified. Looking to strip back imposed societal meanings and interpretations to reveal raw, personal presence within landscape, these women are seen reclaiming power and representation through autonomy of body.

The collection of photography, merges within the exhibition. Showcases the collective works, emerging from this photographic research. creates a dedicated space for female perspectives, providing a platform of voice, visibility, and meaningful dialogue. This body of work is not solely the product of a researcher, but a deeply collaborative process shaped by the participation of 50 women whose contribution and engagement are the essence of the research. It celebrates the strength, complexity, and empowerment captured in the images offering the participants an opportunity to see their own power reflected back at them, while simultaneously grounding themselves in the overwhelming presence of womanhood.

Set within the tormer Workinamen's Club, this exhibition embraces the inherent tension between the space's industrial. masculine history and the presence of nature and women captured in the photographs. Juxtaposition thus forms the narrative of the exhibition, utilising photography as both as an exploration of space, for reflection on perception, interpretation, and meaning. Photographs trace a shifting terrain: bodies in relation to nature, to domestic space, to industrial, to each other. The domestic appears not as comfort, but as performance, pressure, resistance. Space becomes layered with meaning, disrupted by reclamation. What was once fixed and is now unsettled and porous, open to reinterpretation.

Images: Artists own