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Cat Flap Pedicure
Collection:CSM Museum & Study Collection
Date: January 2021
Artist: Hazel Tomlinson
Dimensions:
Duration: 26 min - total running time for all three videos
Medium: Performance piece/ Video work (Pedicure props including nail varnish, nail file, water, towel, white painters trousers and white top)
Object number: MISC.2021.60.CC.1-3
DescriptionThree digitial videos of performance. Description by artist:
I am a support service,
I’ve been made that way and it will never change.
I am a nurturer,
I’ve been made but never asked.
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 an 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?
(Supporting work/ pieces around this dissect the idea of female roles that are still well intrenched into society, the unconscious obligations of motherhood and the negotiation of projected opinion over women’s autonomy over their own bodies.) https://hazeltomlinson.hotglue.me
I am a support service,
I’ve been made that way and it will never change.
I am a nurturer,
I’ve been made but never asked.
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 an 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?
(Supporting work/ pieces around this dissect the idea of female roles that are still well intrenched into society, the unconscious obligations of motherhood and the negotiation of projected opinion over women’s autonomy over their own bodies.) https://hazeltomlinson.hotglue.me