WOMANHOURS

Tyler Payne (Australia)

How many hours does it take to perform womanhood? How do social expectations affect the individual?

Brazilian waxing and fake tanning are just some of the many practices society expects women to do in order to correct their bodies for consumption. Womanhours investigates how these practices have contributed to and transformed the social construction of women’s gender. The processes of these ‘improvements’ aim at impossible perfection. The normalisation of their effects on the appearance of the body has established a strong cultural expectation toward their performance. The act of repeated waxing, shaving, plucking and retouching are usually hidden from view; now they are presented for all to see.

Tyler Payne focuses on the genre of self-portraiture in photography and video to investigate the relationship of women’s embodiment. Her practice concentrates on a study of the recent popularization of a range of female cosmetic rituals, celebrity culture and women’s bodies, in which she analyses, re-enacts and documents how these rituals of bodily transformation have reconfigured the social construction of the female gender. Tyler is currently a Ph.D. candidate at RMIT University.

WOMANHOURS was commissioned by Science Gallery Melbourne