Making waves on the Internet for her avant garde photography, Prue Stent is an upcoming Australian photographer to watch out for. Taking conceptual and dreamlike photos that acknowledge the female form and its contours, Prue breaks and showcases the focus of society on the female body rather than on its personality and independence.
Hailing from Sydney and studying at RMIT University in Melbourne, Prue Stent has been fascinated with photography since an early age, a time when her work was fueled with impulse from road trips. With her strong inclination towards nature, Prue’s work largely explores the connection between the female form and landscapes, addressing the body by its allurement, robustness and vulnerability. At the same time she manages to capture a delicacy about the female form identifying her stance in the empowerment of women in a subdued manner. The process of her work is such that she concocts and visualizes her ideas prior to shooting, which illustrates a purely surreal but tangible quality to her photos.
Attracted to the female silhouette as an ornate object for its aesthetic qualities, Prue sets out to distort the traditional standards of how the female body is usually portrayed, where history has previously regarded them to be submissive and even whimsical. She challenges and empowers the idea of the female form in an uncompromising way using pink to challenge society’s standards of how women are usually associated with this specific colour, indicating naivety and purity. Pink is usually used throughout most of her photos in a way that expresses a tenderness which is strongly associated with femininity, relating to all the principles of gender identity and politics. However, Prue bluntly harnesses the colour onto the female form, smearing it into specific parts and areas of the body such as the eyes, breasts and lips, branding them as sacred yet sensual entities of the female body.
Collectively using the human form to fuse sculpture and photography together, Prue Stent brings a dynamic tension to her photos where she reduces the female form to an organic entity; where it lies in the centre of obscure imagery and surrealism, exploting the themes of revitalization and liberty.
