Empty Vessel
$10,000 Acquisitive Prize
Cassandra McMahon
Empty Vessel 2025
Self-portrait
Archival digital photographic print on Platine Fiber Rag
63.5 x 51 cm
About the Artwork
This self-portrait examines how purpose and meaning is imposed onto women’s bodies through the metaphor of absence. Drawing on the visual language of still life to interrogate long-held associations between femininity and fertility, I have placed a shell over my face to question cultural assumptions surrounding womanhood and reproductive agency. The hollow shell becomes a site on which societal anxieties around childlessness, legacy, and value are placed. It asks whether a woman’s worth is still measured by her capacity or choice to engage in bearing children and what it means to exist outside of those expectations. Has autonomy been truly achieved when a woman’s choice not to participate in child rearing remains contested, scrutinised or misunderstood? Empty Vessel attempts to reclaim feminine symbolism without the submission to biological destiny.
About the Artist
Cassandra McMahon is an emerging artist currently studying Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania. Her work explores themes of interconnection, resilience, and memory in relation to her lived experience as a previous forensics officer but also in relation to the experiences of others. Cassandra’s practice came about through the use of her camera in the daily exercise of crime scene documentation and evolved into a means of translating what she was feeling. She has previously been a finalist in the Percivals Photographic Portrait Prize (2022, 2024), receiving Highly Commended in 2024 and Runner Up in the black-and-white category of this year’s Photographer of the Year Award presented by Australian Photography magazine.