CATFLAP PEDICURE SERIES

My practice negotiates the immediacy of I how interpret my existence in the world particularly focusing on the female experience and the ‘female condition’. I actively observe and respond to personal/ private events and also public events throughout the year, as and when they happen, making my work contextualised from the contribution of organic ongoing occurrences. These contributing happenings inspire performances and sculptures that, at first encounter, seem lighthearted and comical. However, they mask the very sinister and real danger of living as a woman in a patriarchal society, this becomes more prevalent in my work as I begin to compare past personal traumas to public current affairs.


During the first lockdown, there was a service being provided in which people were able to receive manicures through their front door letter slots by beauticians. I found this image incredibly dystopian and, ultimately, depressing. I really wanted to incorporate it into my practice because I felt as though it runs parallels with the poetry I was writing at the beginning of the year. A lot of what I write is fuelled by my insecurities and these insecurities have been stimulated by the relentless sensation of scrutiny and beautification standards that women are ruthlessly subjected to. The image above is an extreme development of the same aforementioned consequences of womanhood. In this more bizzar recreation of the initial manicure service we see, or don’t see, a woman at the height of the Covid 19 pandemic still feeling the need to uphold a level of maintenance even in the current state of being concealed to the world due to governmental lockdown regulations.

Cramped in this very seedy doorway performing the first pedicure, I being to think more on the route of this work and the economic relationship between the beautician/ service provider and client. Questions about economic divisions and the creation of a underclass and a permanent workforce uncomfortably linger as the footage progresses. There is an abstraction of the client behind the door as they partially 'hang out' of these differing portals, untouchable and unreachable. On both sides, there is something that prevents us from rendering each character to a full human being, one is denoted to the worker and labeled as such while the other is dehumanised to a singular piece of body, who is the true subordinate? Who achieves the least amount of dehumanisation?