Laura Conway

Statement

Venus in Ferns is a satirical dance-for-camera film that queers Victorian gardening manuals and their rigid ideals of femininity, domesticity, and self-control. Inspired by Edwardian-era lifestyle texts—some absurdly suggesting that women avoid becoming too robust by catching tuberculosis—the film draws a line from past to present, asking what regressive ideologies might be embedded in today’s wellness culture, therapy culture, and aspirational media.

An urban pastoral, the film was shot on 16mm with student collaborators on a stage set with a painted backdrop, referencing the artifice of Hollywood melodrama (Black Narcissus, The Sound of Music) and Queer classics (Pink Narcissus). Artifice becomes critique: camp and theatricality undo the repression embedded in both gardening and gender.

Following Mark Fisher’s hauntological impulse and Susan Sontag’s ideas on camp, Venus in Ferns uses the past to speak to the present—and perhaps, to warn the future.