Gritty Yet Girly: The Massey artist canvassing the complexities of femininity

Fairy lights bathe the room in a soft, hazy glow, jewellery and makeup melting across the floor. Inside a cocoon of pink and cream, a group of girls are ready to go out. Laughter and playful insults bounce through the room as wine bottles are drained, hair is teased into perfection, and false nails are glued into place. 

Inevitably, the curls will collapse, makeup will streak, and someone’s nail will tear clean off – turning a perfect manicure into something jagged and raw. But what lingers at the end of the night, is the multifaceted world of women.  

For fourth year Fine Arts student, Anaïs Walton-France, the beautifully gritty and chaotic is at the heart of how she is redefining femininity through her snapshot-like paintings.  

Sitting down with Anaïs, she appears like a walking artwork. With hints of pink woven through her hair, clothes, and makeup, Anaïs radiates femininity — but not in a traditional way. Piercings glint across her face and ears, and while her look is carefully curated, it carries a deliberate messiness. 

She explains that her look embraces the traditional elements of femininity while combining the gritty side of it. This has translated into her paintings, where she’s reclaiming what it means to be a woman.  

“Being a woman is a feeling. It can be complex, it can be beautiful, it can be chaotic.”  

Her art now aims to stretch boundaries, highlighting the tension between traditional and nontraditional femininity. She explores how women are flattened into archetypes, “The patriarchy puts women in a very small, very narrow box,” she says. “My paintings and what they explore push those boundaries out and say that I get to decide what it means to me to be a woman.” 

To Anaïs, being a woman is so much more than one thing, “It’s important when asking yourself what it means to be a woman that you question tradition and consider some less conventional things.” 

Last year, Anaïs painted scenes of sisterhood – an exploration of girlhood shaped by her relationship with her sisters. Images of young girls on swings and hosting tea parties come alive on canvases. “I saw that as the root of my femininity,” she says. “I loved the sweet innocence of childhood.” From crocs, pink tutus, to tea playsets, the paintings are memories of girlhood. 

But critiquing her own work, Anaïs feels the paintings lacked depth. She explains that as children, our identities are still forming and don’t yet hold the rich, messy history that life later allows us to explore.  

So, this year, her focus shifted towards womanhood.  

“I felt like I was ready to grow up and explore what femininity means to me now as an adult.” 

Her paintings often begin with photographs of small, intimate moments — messy bedside tables, chipped nails, quick snapshots which feel like a private Instagram feed. 

“The world I’m creating is like a camera roll. Just small, casual moments which contribute to this larger collection of moments,” Anaïs says. “I’m sort of building a profile or a person through my paintings.” 

One painting depicts her own hand with broken nails — one nail ripped off during the Charli XCX mosh at Laneway Festival, and another was sliced in half during a gig.  

“I looked down at my hand and was like ‘oh god that is so janky!’ I was just dancing really hard. It looked fucked up,” she laughs. “But it shows that even though I do my nails and look cute, it will never get in the way of dancing as hard as I want to dance.” 

But Anaïs' way of being feminine won’t be the same as yours or mine. She explains, “I don’t really want to say this is exactly what femininity is, because it’s so different for everyone. It’s experience. It’s personal. It’s autobiographical.” 

“Ultimately, femininity is one’s own experience.” 

One of her guiding inspirations is 1960s French writer Anaïs Nin (who surprisingly is not her namesake). Labelled as an erotic writer for her time, much of Nin’s writings dwells on what it means to be a woman.  

“She [Nin] talks about the storms and terrors of being a woman. Being a woman can be very tumultuous, and turbulent, and emotional, and tough.” 

Nin has an idea of art coming from her womb — which can be exclusive when it comes to what it means to be a woman — but Anaïs interprets this meaning more symbolically. “What I create comes from inside my body, that the core essence of womanhood comes from inside us. For some, that might be a uterus while to others it might be an internal energy.” 

She believes that while some of what Nin wrote is outdated, the history of women plays a vital role in understanding modern femininity. “What being a woman is now couldn’t be what it is without the woman that came before us”.  

As graduation approaches, Anaïs plans to move to Melbourne next year and dreams of eventually making it to New York.  

She says, “In my dream world, I would be living in New York. I would be painting every day. I would be surrounded by creative people and collaborating with creative people all the time. I would be growing, I would be creating, I would be learning.” 

For now, Anaïs continues to redefine femininity — painting it as something personal, complex, beautiful, quiet, loud and chaotic.