Making-Up, 2025
Silicone, synthetic hair, lab coat, aluminium hooks and rings, make-up paraphernalia, spray cans, acrylics.
Making-Up reframes Trump as both a product and process, and appears unassuming at first. Its chaos seemed unintentional in the context of an art school open studio, and requires the audience to linger, putting together fragments of information, and disrupting expectations of how we visually identify truth, demonstrating how the aesthetics of evidence can be co-opted by those in positions of power in order to mislead, or create alternative narratives, fictions, facts.
Making-Up: 'Spray-Tan in a Can, for the Discerning Dictator' - spray cans, printed labels.
Making-Up: The Making-Of draws parallels between the magic and mechanics of Frankenstein, and the process of making the Trump skin slabs: dead bodies taken apart in order to make (up) a new creature, brought to life by a team of workers, but also through narrative. There is an emphasis on process, the mechanical labour behind the product, and the unease of knowing that something horrible is being created, even if it is not clear exactly what.
Making-Up: The Making-Of. Video, (1min38)
"I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had created, the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out"
- Mary Shelley, 1831.