In her ongoing AI-driven world-building project Auntieverse, niceaunties explores the cultural archetype of the auntie—transforming her into a protagonist of humour, resilience, and self-expression moving through speculative cities, surreal economies, and imagined futures.
Auntiescapes extends niceaunties' ongoing Auntieverse project through a sustained investigation of the body. Bringing together works developed from 2025 to the present, the exhibition builds on earlier series—Spring Skin (2024), Under My Skin (2024), Auntiebody (2024), and the Spa Menu chapter (2023–2024)—which examined beauty, skin, and the societal pressures placed on the female body. The current body of work shifts focus towards less visible dimensions: energy, emotion, and the ways internal states imprint themselves onto physical form.
For niceaunties, the body is a living landscape. Skin behaves like terrain, continuously renewing, hosting microorganisms, and responding to cycles much like the Earth itself, while flesh becomes geological, layered with memory and time. Emotions move through it as forces, shaping and reshaping perception. This reflects an understanding of the body as inseparable from its environment, proposing a continuous exchange between self and world.
Drawing on philosophical reflections such as those of Alan Watts, the work questions the systems of naming and categorisation imposed upon bodies, particularly female bodies. By loosening these labels, the exhibition opens a space in which the body can be encountered as fluid, unstable, and irreducible to fixed definitions.
Individual works articulate this inquiry through different registers. Hot Bod reflects on the transformation of the menopausal body; Cycles traces rhythms of renewal; Junk Butt addresses accumulation and the need for release; Body Bag examines surgical intervention as both vulnerability and control. In Auntgel, a giant auntie inhabits a landscape, gently pouring tea as a gesture of balance and equilibrium. Homebody and Falls initially appear as surreal landscapes — a smoking volcano, a cascading waterfall until closer inspection reveals the terrain is made of epidermis, flesh, and aunties.
At the centre of the exhibition is an interactive installation, Mirror into the Auntieverse, in which the viewer's reflection is replaced by an auntie who delivers familiar, often blunt observations. First presented at Paris Photo in 2025, the work extends the project's engagement with photography as both image capture and psychological reflection.
