MISShapes

“Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all”

―André Breton, Nadja, 1928

MISShapes is a monochrome fine art photography series that examines how the female “social body” is constructed within contemporary image culture. The work emerges as a response to an inherited gaze shaped by media, culture, and lived experience.

Through advertising and mass media, the female body is fragmented into parts and reduced to isolated forms, reinforcing narrow ideals of beauty while fuelling cycles of desire, anxiety, and consumption.

Approaching the body as a landscape of shapes and textures, the work uses light as a sculptural tool to shift culturally coded fragments of the female body into abstraction. Familiar forms become unstable, oscillating between recognition and distortion.

Through this process of visual deconstruction, MISShapes challenges inherited ideals of classical beauty, reimagining the female form as fluid, fragmented, and resistant to fixed definition within contemporary fine art photography practice.


Selected Images — MISShapes

Fine art photography series exploring body fragmentation, the female gaze, and contemporary beauty constructs.

Credits

Photography, Art Direction & Model: Beatriz Perez

Photographer Assistant: Shabbab Khan


Selected Reviews

“This is a moody and incisive group of images in this selection…These deconstructions are creating shapes that push the boundaries of classical beauty and abstract the female form into new parts… I enjoy that you are denying the viewer the satisfaction of it being what one might want it to be."

— LensCulture Project Review

"Perez shows “a circularity where women are ‘sold back’ to themselves" in glossy red, like the magazine pages which entice us to believe the unrealistic hype which surrounds the female form in the media. Her critique through female body parts seduce & scare in equal measure."

— Laura Noble, LA Noble Gallery Director

You have found a way to balance the pleasure and the critique in your body images. You have created a work of fascination, but one which interrogates the viewer and seeks to position within the debates around the idealisation of the female body, and the cultural burden and damage it creates”.

— David Bate, Artist, Writer, Co-founder photographies Journal

“Your images are beautiful without being overtly sexy. You are making an abstraction from an ordinary, recognisable form…The photographs you have created appear as abstract sculpture. It is graceful and elegant. The eye travels around a wonderful landscape of shape and texture.”

— LensCulture Project Review


A selection of MISShapes images has been exhibited at:

MAPS Exhibition, Ambika P3, London, 2013. Curated by Dr Elizabeth Upper, University of Cambridge.

Colour Assembly Pop-up Exhibition, sponsored by the London Borough of Camden, London, 2017

Branches, ECOFeminism Festival Exhibition, The Art Pavilion, London, 2024, curated and organised by ART from HEARTCIC.

Exhibitions

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Cuerpo Vestido, Alma Desnuda