Cora Devlin

My practice examines the long-standing negative effect that the biblical story of Adam and Eve has had on the treatment of women in modern society. I challenge Christianity’s dominant prescription of traditional gender stereotypes by reimagining this narrative through a feminist lens. Working across performance-to-camera, costuming and installation, I subvert this story by utilising gender reversal. By juxtaposing contemporary gender-reversed imagery against its historical counterparts, I question the present, investigating how far society has come in dismantling conventional gender stereotypes.

The modern-day theatre and its accompanying iconography, emerges as intrinsically important to my work. In exploring gender as performance, the theatre serves as a place that permits the transformation of bodies and the traversing of the gender binary. These fresh formations in which I, the artist, become a performer, strive to disrupt the overarching notion of gender as fixed or dictated, introducing instead an understanding of gender as shaped by social and personal influences.