Kate Bancroft’s practice engages the still life tradition as a site of feminist inquiry, using symbolic objects, fruits, flowers, oysters, and gelatin forms as proxies for the body and its states of desire, fragility, and transformation. By superimposing her own eyes within these objects, she disrupts the historical positioning of women as the passive object of the gaze, asserting instead a self-determined subjectivity.

Her work negotiates pleasure and critique simultaneously: lush surfaces and seductive imagery invite the viewer in, only to reframe the encounter around questions of gender, representation, and power. Drawing upon the kitsch aesthetics of the 1970s, Bancroft situates her practice within a broader discourse on feminism, embodiment, and the politics of visibility. Through this, she reclaims the still life genre as a space of resistance, agency, and re-imagined forms of looking.