Artist
Raven Gough
Artist
Artist Bio
(b. 1991, Barry, Wales) is a Cardiff-based artist, who recently graduated from The University of South Wales with a BA in photography. Raven has spent the two years since leaving university, where she came out as trans, as a practicing artist and professional photographer, working closely with and supporting the LGBT+ community.
Raven continually strides to try to discover hidden truths, through the alternative worlds exposed by alternative photographic practice. By exploring the relationship that photography has with truth, Raven hopes to create art that is a force for powerful change in the world – highlighting and accentuating the beauty that others might not be able to see, while revealing the darkness that those in power wish to hide.
Artwork Description
Through photography, Raven Gough attempts to understand her identity as a transgender woman, independently and within the wider world. Gough is particularly interested in the relationship between the Psychological Self – who we are at our core – and the Sociological Self – the version of ourselves that we project outwards. They explore the societal conventions that surround womanhood, how they influence her and how that compares to what they feel defines them as a woman.
In The Fantasy, Gough throws a spotlight on the gender roles society projects onto individuals, in particular expectations of women in relation to motherhood. The intimate self-portrait allows the viewer into a profoundly private moment that many women will recognise – belly puffed out as if pregnant, daydreaming about what it might be like to conceive and birth a child. A fantasy that many women, whether trans or AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) may also not be able to realise.
