A Girl Is More Than A Gun

A Girl Is More Than A Gun was created as both a conceptual and material experiment. It was my first time working with offset printing and collage, and I wanted to push myself formally while ensuring that the language I used carried depth. I aimed to make the imagery visually accessible while embedding layered meaning beneath the surface. The project began with hours of cutting up magazines and isolating fragments of text. For years, the phrase “A Girl Is a Gun” sat at the top of my notes. It resurfaced with urgency after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, at a time when bodily autonomy was being restricted while gun rights remained fiercely protected. The phrase felt newly charged. My first encounter with it dates back to my adolescence on Tumblr, where it circulated alongside references to the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” I’ve witnessed the constant reinvention of the “ideal” woman, in which each era femininity is reshaped into something either dangerously excessive or insufficient. The phrase reduced the girl to an object. While working on the collage, Halsey, an artist I’ve followed for over a decade, released a song of the same title. Its hardcore sound drawing from Nine Inch Nails and aesthetics inspired by the queen of punk, Vivienne Westwood, reinforced the aggression embedded in the phrase. Through research, I traced the phrase further back to its roots in Western cinema. Ultimately, I chose to reframe it as A Girl Is More Than A Gun, transforming the statement into resistance. To ground the work visually, I required imagery of a Western woman armed with a gun to reference the origins of the terminology and fortunately found the perfect depiction in an image of activist and actor, Jane Fonda. The collaged words are isolated and layered so that each term demands individual attention. The limited palette of black and magenta heightens contrast and tension: black evoking power and finality, magenta referencing femininity while refusing softness.