Sour-Puss: The Opera

Sour-Puss: The Opera is the result of a 5-year collaboration between artist duo Diogo Duarte and Jessica Mitchell who also work in mental health. Consisting of photographs, drawings and texts, the 'Sour-Puss' of the title is a composite character sometimes based on real-life Mitchell and real-life Duarte and their life experiences.

Duarte and Mitchell were colleagues turned
and then friends. The birth of 'Sour-Puss' was a gradual one emerging
through conversations and arguments where they uncovered similarities in
worldview, their feelings relating to themselves and a mutual dislike for
'positive thinking'.

'The composite character bearing both biographical and fictional traits was
created to expose the hypocrisies and inconsistencies within normative power
structures. 'Sour-Puss' has no desire to 'accept' or 'assimilate' mainstream
versions of gender and sexuality. 'Sour-Puss' is in the truest sense of the
word, queer'.

'She is neither passive nor an object nor a limp body for my eyes to feast on.
Even though my gaze, when I frame the photograph, is irrevocably mine and not
Jessica's, conceptually it's not just my gaze, it's ours. That is fundamentally
what makes this collaboration unique. The story of the woman in the photographs
and her drawings, but also her narrative, arose out of many hours of conversing
with Jessica about pain and repression, but also about happiness and freedom'.
- Diogo Duarte

'The series has led to some honest and challenging conversations. It has
shocked me just how surprised some people are that anyone would take pictures
of a woman who looks like me ... I think middle-aged women terrify people --we are
uncategorisable, we are harbingers of the 'doom' facing us all and we are cut
loose, at least potentially, from many of the roles society likes to impose on
women. Somehow 'Sour-Puss' embodies this--that I might do anything--and, in fact,
I plan to'. - Jessica Mitchell

'Melancholia and a sense of isolation or alienation, feeling fundamentally
wrong or at odds with the world, are the backing track to the work. Questions
are raised concerning sexuality and gender, age and beauty, body image, and
even the idea of redemption or reconciliation and how it can be possible--or if
it can be possible-- to live within the context of one's own

'insanities, ' accepting these as part of whom one is. Acceptance of
oneself--the good, the

bad and the ugly, or, as Mitchell says: 'loving oneself, and screwing up, and
loving one's self again--accepting all the imperfections'. - From the essay by
Anna McNay