A EXHIBITION of two photographers with strongly feminine perspectives is opening at a gallery in Great Missenden today.

Alix Marie and Rachel Thomson were joint winners of Photosensitive 2011 and are displaying their new photographic and print work at One Church Street Gallery.

The exhibition is entitled dol, which has an ambiguous meaning. Their work hints at the Latin meaning of dolor meaning pain, while has the more obvious association with the word doll as a child's plaything.

Rachel uses cyanotype, the earliest and rawest form of photography, to make unique photogram blueprints, sometimes combined with silkscreened graphic symbols. Her source material comes from the urban environment, as seen from her everyday bicycling perspective. Her themes are anxiety over mass-production, over-consumption, and the disposability of expensive, slick technologies yet underlying this is a desire for optimism and the craving for some kind of spiritual certainty.

Alix’s photographs explore the understanding, depiction and transgression of femininity. Her work is often richly layered. Animals and body parts, both real and ceramic, find their way into her photographs and an uneasy, unsettling mood often pervades the work. Her current practice pursues enquiry about femininity and the body, the relationship between femininity and animality and reflects on how the feminine is perceived and experienced today.

The exhibition runs from April 20 to May 4 and is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 11am to 4pm at One Church Street Gallery, 1, Church Street, Great Missenden, HP16 0AX. Contact 01494 863344 or go to www.onechurchstreet.com