Me ladies - the duo

"Me Ladies” is a duo of photographic-based digital artworks created as part of the practice-based PhD research project.

This body of work sits at the intersection of portraiture, historical resistance, and digital experimentation, challenging the visual erasure of Black women from traditional European and British art narratives.

Each artwork in the set is composed of two original portrait photographs: one taken at the Chatham Fashion Show in Medway female fashion collection on display summer of 2024, referencing historical garments and period silhouettes.

Overall conceptual and curatorial inspiration is drawn from British Museums' and their art collections, reimagining if there was no erasure, how would the collection look?

The work confronts the historical invisibility and exclusion of Black women in art history and museum spaces. By inserting Black British femininity into frames historically reserved for whiteness, “Me Ladies” is both a counter-narrative and a reclaiming.

The title itself, “Me Ladies,” asserts both intimacy and authority, recasting the muse as subject and the observed as the author. It also responds directly to the false notion that Black presence in historical Britain was rare or exceptional. Instead, this work insists, we were not that rare; we were erased.

From a methodological perspective, “Me Ladies” is grounded in autoethnography, visual anthropology, and intersectional feminist theory. The work forms part of the ADN Framework© (Anthro-Digital Narratives), a practice-based research model developed by me, which foregrounds the use of digital tools and sensory-based archives to reconstruct lived experience from the margins.

As a neurodivergent Black woman, I use visual practice to speak across silences to record, remember, and resist. The duo format references mirror work, kinship, and multiplicity, rejecting the idea of singular representation. It’s a layered act of cultural repair, memory work, and speculative belonging.

Alt Text for Me Ladies [A]:
Digital portrait of a Black woman in a rich midnight-blue puff-sleeve gown. Her natural hair is crowned with roses, and she wears layers of pearls. The image blends real-life photography with AI-generated still life, landscape, and historical dress textures from V&A Museum research. Inspired by classical oil paintings, reimagined through a Black diasporic lens.

Alt Text for Me Ladies [B]:
Digital portrait of a Black woman with a soft afro wearing a burgundy corset and voluminous pink sleeves. She is adorned with pearl jewellery and gazes calmly. The composition blends photographic portraiture with AI textures drawn from fashion photos taken at the V&A Museum. Influenced by The Met Museum’s narrative curation, this piece asserts presence and elegance.

This work engages with and contributes to critical discourses on:

Black Feminist Visual Thought
(hooks, 1995; Collins, 2000; Tate, 2015)

Decolonising Art History
(Elkins, 2007; Shilliam, 2018; Dabiri, 2020)

Autoethnographic Methodologies
(Spry, 2001; Ellis et al., 2011)

Algorithms of Oppression & AI Bias
(Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019)

Museological Critique
(Cuno, 2008; Enwezor, 2010; Hicks, 2020)

Intersectionality & Visual Culture
(Crenshaw, 1991; Nash, 2008; Mirza, 2013)

By blending ethnographic method, AI aesthetics, and digital resistance, “Me Ladies” contributes to a growing field of Black digital cultural production and decolonial creative research practices, offering a dynamic model for reclaiming representation within both academic and public-facing archives.

For the purpose of my research, hashtags are below:

#MeLadies #MichiMasumi #BlackArtMatters #AfroVictorian #BlackFeminism #DigitalDiaspora #AIArt #Canon90D #VAMuseum #MetMuseumInspiration #VisualAnthropology #StillLifeRemixed #AutoethnographyArt #PhoetryInMotion #RewritingTheArchive #PracticeBasedResearch #BlackPortraiture #BlackBritishArt #NeurodivergentArtist #FashionArchives #DiasporicFutures #ADNFramework #IntersectionalFeminism #BlackWomenInArt #TheBlackArtHub #ResistErasure #WeWereAlwaysHere