After our pitch to Conan and Ally, work was still needed to be done. We focused on makeup as our main working point and discarded the rest of our idea.

We built up an idea from the action of putting on makeup. It’s an act of masking yourself, hiding your true identity. We then went thought about all the products used to ‘better’ the female image and thought it would be an interesting concept to create a piece of artwork from cosmetics. We could then film the making of this artwork, showing that as we add more and more, the look becomes worse until the final product is a mess – the antithesis of what was intended. This would be played, with the actual artwork on display next to it. We also thought a track of people’s views on makeup could be played while we were applying our own makeup. The purpose of this piece was to show firstly, the damaging effects makeup can have on women and secondly, how and why women feel the need to wear it and whether they actually want to or not.

After another discussion we were advised to steer clear of other people’s views and either stick with our own or not have any. It’s our performance, so it should be what we think and feel. Not only this, but we were limiting ourselves to an idea and not going further with it. We needed to explore and actually do things rather than talk about more ideas. Suggestions were made to go to the collection and set ourselves some tasks to do.

Consequently, we went to the collection and executed the tasks. We inspected the bathroom at the Usher Gallery and with its long mirror, thought it could be a good performance space. We set ourselves the challenge of staring at ourselves in the mirror for 10 minutes in silence. This was harder than I expected. The slightest noise or disruption would cause me to laugh as the silent atmosphere, with the tension of knowing that you have to be absolutely silent and focused, was hard to overcome. We managed about 5 minutes of undisturbed silence and aimed to come back and practice in the upcoming weeks.

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The use of the mirror was to show that women spend a great deal of time in front of a mirror because they focus so much on their appearance, “All research to date on body image shows that women are much more critical of their appearance than men.” (Fox, 1997) The appearances of women are judged more than men, “and standards of female beauty are considerably higher and more inflexible.” (Fox, 1997)

This relates back to the female nudes, which is what started this whole process. The idea that these paintings were created for the male gaze (the dominating members of society at the time) still holds somewhat true with today. Women feel under pressure to look good for society and though it can be argued that it can be for themselves too, the theme still remains.

References

Fox. K (1997) Mirror, mirror – A summary of research findings on body image [Online] http://www.sirc.org/publik/mirror.html [Accessed: 22nd March]