2016 was a powerful year of beginnings. I moved from New York City to Paris, stopping my nearly decade long fashion modelling career to focus solely on ecofeminist art. I began modelling as a young girl with a deep love for clothes and beauty but grew severely depressed promoting so much inauthenticity and disillusioned by the often toxic patriarchal values.
Fashion is the 2nd most harmful industry to our planet, and the more I witnessed and understood the impact and destruction that fashion has not only on the planet but also on humans and animals I knew I had to make big life changes.
One of those changes was removing toxic practices, products and people that no longer served me and focusing solely on my art. Art as a medicine. Art as a healer. Art that is honest, does no harm and is rooted in my own matriarchal values of kindness, safety and love.
I was introduced to Hara in 2017 by my friend Lucy, a thoughtful, spirited yoga instructor and native Aussie who discovered Hara at her local farmer's market, St Andrews, where Allie used to sell her handmade pieces in a small stall by herself. Lucy and I both fell in love with Hara because of our shared values; compassion, respect, and love for our beautiful earth, mother nature, and all living creatures; our bodies included.
Mother earth and women's bodies live in seasons and cycles that modern patriarchal society does not honor, understand or make space for. For me, loving my body means honoring all natural cycles, not always doing but sometimes simply being, listening, feeling, and resting. Being and true resting are not possible without safety, which is always my priority. Safe spaces, safe people, safe fabrics and safe practices.
Every black and white image in this series was developed in my menstrual blood.
We have spent so long being told it is waste. Something to manage, to minimise, to hide. But I believe it is the opposite. To bleed is to be in conversation with time itself. With the moon. With every woman and body who has bled before us. With the earth, which also moves in cycles, which also sheds, which also regenerates.
"We have never been separate from nature. We just forgot"
This work is a decade in the making. 2016 to 2026. A celebration of the natural body, of simplicity, of choosing intentional products made to feel good, worn for years, grown gently on this earth.
Re-use. Re-love. Re-think. Re-imagine.
