Áine Phillips
Ireland
The relentless application
layer upon layer
of transfiguring cosmetics
She takes on the identity of a cultural icon and female goddess, the BVM. She obliterates her own image under successive layers of cosmetics. This is a transformative process: make-up is used as art material, as creative and expressionist matter.
The performer, grotesquely masked by cosmetics, is disordered but liberated from conventional behaviour and the constraints of socially constructed womanly beauty. The performer represents both the Madonna and fertility goddess. She looses the veil and paints her multiple breasts in celebration of female sexuality and fecundity. She is everywoman ‘making-up’. She enacts a daily ritual, but a ritual elaborated, transgressed.
(Text: heroes + holies catalogue, 2002)
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