Britney Spears
ORIGINAL SERIES
She was
crazy
Britney Spears became one of the most famous women in the world while still incredibly young — and her distress became public entertainment.
Britney Spears spent decades under extraordinary public scrutiny. Her body, sexuality, relationships, motherhood and mental health were picked apart by tabloids, television hosts, photographers and the public.
When she visibly struggled, the language around her became increasingly cruel. She was called crazy, unstable, an unfit mother and a train wreck. Her distress became spectacle.
In 2008, Britney was placed under a conservatorship that gave others extensive control over her life and finances. It lasted nearly fourteen years.
The same woman relentlessly sexualised and scrutinised by the public was then used as evidence of what happened when a woman was supposedly too unstable to control herself.
THE DESTRUCTION
Controlled
About the Work
2026
Acrylic on canvas
I flooded Britney’s portrait with aggressive neon pink. Pink is conventionally feminine, but here it is almost violent — deliberately overwhelming the original portrait in reference to the extreme sexualisation and femininity imposed upon her throughout her career.
I dragged and smudged paint around her eyes, disrupting the immaculate makeup of the original portrait and evoking the crying, distress and apparent loss of control that became public spectacle.
Across her face and body are words used publicly to describe and diminish her: crazy, unfit mother, washed up, fat, train wreck, out of control. Rather than illustrating Britney herself, the destruction attempts to illustrate the distorted version of Britney that was constructed around her.