City Chicks, Photography from tthe Selfie Art Series by Sarnia de la Maré FRSA

City Chicks by iServalan (Sarnia de la Mare) hand altered photo #selfieart #digitalart #women

Image Description

The artwork, titled City Chicks, presents a surreal, layered digital collage featuring three mirrored self-portraits of the artist. Each figure wears a shimmering gold mini-dress with long, platinum-white braids cascading forward, veiling the face of the central figure. Their tattooed legs dominate the lower half of the composition, extending toward cracked egg yolks that drip against an urban skyline faintly visible in the background. The repetition of the figure creates a sense of rhythm and power, yet their toes press against fragile eggshells, one visibly bleeding, amplifying the tension between strength and vulnerability. The backdrop of oversized chicks introduces irony, tenderness, and contrast—softness against steel, innocence against performance.

City Chicks – Walking on Eggshells in a Golden Age of Performance

In my latest work, City Chicks, I explore the fragile dance women perform to maintain their public image in a world still shaped by male expectations.

The piece is a digital manipulation of full-body self-portraits, multiplied and mirrored into a striking tableau. Three versions of myself stand in shimmering gold dresses, platinum braids veiling the central figure’s face. Beneath, tattooed legs extend toward cracked egg yolks—symbols of fragility and pressure. One set of toes bleeds, revealing the cost of walking on eggshells in plain sight.

The backdrop juxtaposes innocence with irony: oversized chicks dominate the scene, their softness at odds with the sharpness of the imagery. They playfully underscore how femininity is often infantilised—sweet, harmless, decorative—even while women are expected to endure and perform with grace.

The city skyline lingers faintly in the background: a reminder that this performance takes place on a public stage. Women in contemporary culture are asked to be endlessly adaptable—visible yet controlled, bold but never threatening. The repetition of my own figure mirrors this demand for constant reinvention, as though one version is never enough.

City Chicks is not simply a self-portrait. It is feminist commentary, irony, and personal myth all layered together. The yolk becomes a metaphor for wasted potential, for fragility beneath the gloss, for the impossible perfection women are asked to maintain.

This work speaks to collectors of contemporary feminist art, those interested in self-portraiture, and anyone who recognises the absurd performance demanded of women in modern society. It is both visually striking and conceptually challenging—at once satirical and sincere.

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✨ City Chicks is available now through my Saatchi store.

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Keywords / Hashtags for SEO

Feminist art, digital self-portraiture, contemporary collage, women in art, surreal feminist photography, feminist symbolism, Saatchi Art, Sarnia de la Maré, ironic portraiture, art about gender roles

Suggested hashtags:
#CityChicks #FeministArt #DigitalCollage #ContemporaryArt #SaatchiArt #WomenInArt #Surrealism #ArtCollectors #FeministSymbolism #TattooedArt

Tribal Grandmother: How Colour and Monochrome Transform the Same Portrait

Tribal Grandmother: Between Electric Reverie and Monochrome Memory

She stands at the edge of two worlds — one drenched in colour like a fevered dream, the other stripped bare to shadow and breath. The wind moves through her feathers. The shore hums beneath her feet. She is myth, she is memory, she is the witness and the storyteller.

The Tribal Grandmother portraits exist in two worlds — one bathed in hallucinatory colour, the other carved from shadow and light. Both hold the same figure, the same costuming, the same gaze — and yet they tell entirely different stories.

In the colour with blue wash edition, the coastal flora background — photographed on a recent nature shoot — bursts into a surreal palette of electric blues, magentas, and violets. It’s an almost impossible colourscape, part coral reef, part alien dream. Against it, the Victorian-inspired costume of layered feather petals and voluminous tulle becomes a luminous apparition. The tattoos along the figure’s legs feel like living hieroglyphs, each mark glowing with amplified energy. This version is spectacle: an immersion into saturated wonder, where every element hums with intensity.

The monochrome edition strips away the vibrancy, allowing the image to breathe in a quieter register. Here, the details sharpen — the grain of the feathers, the shadows caught in the folds of tulle, the interplay of skin and ink. Without colour’s distraction, the scene becomes ceremonial, even confrontational. It feels older, heavier, as though it belongs to an archive of portraits from a parallel past. The mood shifts from dreamlike to deliberate; from a celebration of visual abundance to a study in poise and presence.

Together, these works reveal the power of palette in shaping narrative. The colour version seduces; the monochrome holds you still. Both contain the same woman — an archetype standing between myth and memory — yet each delivers her in a different emotional language.

The Bridesmaid, Altered hand painted digital photogaraph by Sarnia de la Maré

 

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The Bridesmaid by Sarnia de la Maré is a surreal bridal portrait in mixed media digital portrait Victorian style. It uses double exposure effect from layers of fine art and contemporary bridal artwork to create a surreal self-portrait photography.

The Bridesmaid
Mixed Media Digital Portrait by Sarnia de la Maré

The Bridesmaid reimagines the timeless role of the wedding attendant through a surreal, dreamlike lens. This self-portrait draws on Victorian hand-painting techniques once used to enhance and romanticise early photographs, now reinterpreted in a digital medium.

The process began with a base photographic portrait, which was digitally “hand painted” to soften features, heighten colour, and add painterly depth, echoing the delicate brushwork of 19th-century studio artists. Two public domain images—a bridal figure and a pastoral landscape—were then overlaid using double-exposure styling, allowing them to merge seamlessly into the composition. The bridal figure appears both within and upon the subject, creating an uncanny interplay between identity and archetype.

White braided hair frames the composition like an ornamental border, while gold-embroidered fabric recalls the opulence of vintage ceremonial attire. The glowing glasses act as a portal into the layered imagery, making the viewer question where one image ends and another begins. The result is a haunting yet celebratory vision, where the modern self-portrait is refracted through history, memory, and ritual.