My work reimagines Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800), a painting long debated for its contradictory treatment of its unnamed sitter. Through collage and parody, the original fabrics and adornments are reconfigured into unlikely objects, shifting the resonance of the subject’s presence. By unsettling the familiar, the work opens space for reflection on how women have been represented, reframed, and reimagined across art history.

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The frames, built from layered nylon, beads, and cushioned surfaces, create a plush, decorative skin. These materials blur craft and ornament, recalling jewelled “portrait-objects” once kept as intimate tokens, while reframing the act of looking and allowing the frame itself to emerge as an active part of the work.

Anastasia Karageorge is an Australian artist based in the UK. She engages with female subjects drawn from the European painting canon. Figures who were historically passive are reinterpreted as empowered narrators of their own stories. While rooted in art-historical reference, her work is personally grounded, drawing from intimate experiences, memories, and emotional resonance. Through appropriation and small visual additions or symbolic gestures, she shifts the narrative around her subjects, giving them agency. Her work aims to reclaim female visibility in art history but also to interrogate whether such reclamation truly disrupts historical inequalities.