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