Shaped as porcelain is an ongoing long-term project, inspired by routines related to care and beauty. From an ironic point of view, it exposes the confusion to choose the most suitable product to achieve the so desired“porcelain skin”, also reflects on the ideological implications that this entails. At the same time, it aims to investigate this kind of created needs for using cosmetics that seem to multiply in seconds – day cream, night cream, serum, lifting products, tonics and other innovative treatments that promise to erase all imperfections and the passage of time.
The starting point of the project refers to the personal experience accumulated over the years, based on recommendations from friends and relatives and also to the marketing strategies in the usual points of sale and the information, often contradictory, that extends through the network. What all these data have in common is the purpose of approaching the beauty standards created by the same consumer society that generates the need to be part of it. Data that are increasingly difficult to analyse and that conflict with the recommendations of experts. As an example, we have the pink mask that is the protagonist of the work Guayaba Mask. The mask that has the best score according Yuka (an app that examines all kind of products). By contrast, dermatologists opt for non- plastic and higher absorption solutions, as would be the case with clay, for example.
This project is interdisciplinary and composed of very diverse pieces – hermetic and useless porcelain containers, some modified, coloured or silkscreen-printed, videos with routines that decompose the face or tiny plastic hama beads that build the scene of a ritual of beauty, to mention some of them. The main objective and the one that has driven the project is to give visibility to a whole series of actions, which have accumulated over the years, and which are often causing irreversible damage. An example could be the Body Dysmorphic Disorder, that consists of concern for imperfections in the physical appearance that no one else perceives.
By Mariya Alipieva.
All images Mariya Alipieva.