Nailshop

Nailshop gathers photographs in which fingernails carry more than decoration. Painted, filed, bitten, damaged or left alone, they sit between biological inheritance and deliberate self-fashioning.

Because nails are treated as evidence of cleanliness, health, class, gender and discipline, they attract judgments that may reveal as much about the observer as the person pictured. Grooming can be pleasure and maintenance, but it can also become a demand to make the body socially legible.

Made in public, these small acts of care become visible performances. The series asks how a minor bodily surface accumulates cultural meaning, and how identity is produced at the boundary between the body and the world.