The world that photographer Miriam Marlene Waldner manifests in her images is full of secrets - an unapologetically feminine world of soft focus scenes and pastel colours that bring to mind the the whimsical aesthetics of Wes Anderson. Learn more about Miriam here as she talks us through five of her favourite images.

American conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian uses hold music, neck pillows and spiderwebs (although not all at once) to create art that explores a whimsical and intelligent look at the systemic reordering of natural processes. 

Jung Lee explores ‘the void’ and ‘words left unsaid’ both in her photography and installations that combine vacant spaces with poetic neon-lit narratives. 

Tokyo-based artist Ran Tondabayashi fuses everyday motifs and words with vivid colourful hues to create strange and surreal images.

Few bonds run as deep as those between sisters, and few relationships are quite as complicated. Photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor has been attempting to capture what sisterhood means, and is releasing a book documenting what she has found.

Jamaica Dyer is a San Francisco-based illustrator and games designer who has turned JellyWolf, a film by Alma Har’el for The Fifth Sense, into a special graphic novel. Flick through the full graphic novel and learn more about Jamaica here.

You’ll be familiar with the term ‘male gaze’ – a phrase coined by feminist critic in Laura Mulvey in 1975. And unless you’ve been hiding under a large rock for several decades, you will have certainly come into contact with it: think any  film, photograph, or  TV show that’s made for the male viewer.

But the tide is turning. Be it the internet, accessibility to cameras or simply the introduction of the first front-facing camera (thanks, Apple), a growing number of the photographs we look at on a daily basis are being taken by women. In the last five years, an unprecedented wave of female photographers has taken the art world by storm, grabbing people's attention with their pictures of women (and themselves). This is the central theme of journalist Charlotte Jansen’s new book, Girl on Girl, in which she interviews 40 artists from 17 different countries. The project is pro-women, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s solely about feminism. “No one would ever say: ‘oh you’re a man, your work must be comment on masculinity,’” Jansen explains. “Yet it’s almost as if you have to start with that question as a woman. Most women are like: ‘of course I’m a feminist’, that’s obvious, right? But it doesn’t mean everything I do is about that.”

To wit: this isn’t simply about ‘female photography’ (there’s no such thing, Jansen says), but addressing and challenging the ways in which the media write about these women.

Five illustrators from the Middle East talk us through their inner thoughts and experiences on pushing the creative envelope in their respective countries.

With paintings based on her own image and culture, Mexican-Korean artist Monica Garza’s work is vital in its representation of body positive females and their relationships in the world.