The work is a visual auto ethnography of my experience of the perimenopause. Created with gouache on cardboard, the substrate represents the capitalist patriarchal view of an older woman -ready to be thrown away, coming to the limits of economic usefulness and no longer conforming to patriarchal beauty expectations.

Melding my own experience with current societal concerns, the work touches on the invisibility of older women, HRT shortages and the oppression of the older female voice, as well as depicting symptoms associated with brain fog and depletion of hormones through the menopausal transition.

Some of the paintings were made spontaneously and represent the abstraction of feelings such as despair and grief, while others were carefully crafted from my own reference photographs, the visual language of focus, clarity and scale representing my experience of the symptom. While all of the paintings are self portraits in one way or another, their resemblance to myself and each other varies in order to depict the idea of alienation from my own body, and an accompanying sense of strangeness and dissociation.

The work examines perimenopause in all its gory, non-glory.