As I built the composition, each object seemed to carry its own version of that femininity. The lipstick is perhaps the most obvious: beauty, presentation, sensuality, and the ritual of putting on a face. The cherry carries a sweetness and playfulness, but also the suggestiveness that has become attached to its image. The telephone feels distinctly nostalgic to me, calling back to an older visual language of femininity and romance.
The hand is actually based on a sculptural object called the Rock On wall hook by Thelermont Hupton: a hand throwing the familiar rock-and-roll gesture that can be mounted on a wall and used as a coat hook. I loved bringing something more rebellious and irreverent into the composition. It complicates the softer or more conventional associations of the other objects and introduces another kind of femininity: louder, harder, and less concerned with being delicate.
Putting them together made me think about how easily we recognize these visual codes. None of these objects are inherently feminine, yet together they begin to construct an identity that feels immediately legible as such. Call Me Red became less about defining femininity and more about questioning where those definitions come from, what we choose for ourselves, what we perform, and what has already been decided for us.
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