Murder by the (Photo)book: Picture-Perfect Victims and the Fetishisation of Femicide through Arts Practice: Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse is the culmination of seven years of PhD research into femicide and the fetishisation of women, explored through visual and material culture, including fashion archives, photography and artists’ books.
The exhibition focusses on the 1841 murder mystery of Mary Rogers, a young woman employed in a New York tobacconist shop and found strangled in the River Hudson. This case was sensationalised by the press as she was named “the beautiful cigar girl”.
Investigating her effectively was only possible through the combination of dressmaking, collecting artefacts, taking photographs and bookmaking. This interdisciplinary practice approach tells the victim’s story through designing the dress and the bonnet. Using an empathetic method to gather fragments of information sourced from newspaper archives in America and True Crime magazines located in the Heritage Quay archives at the University of Huddersfield, the work recontextualises the usual discourse and challenges traditional views that glamorise the portrayal of women as picture-perfect victims.