Best in Show

Beauty is sold as empowerment, yet the commodification of the female body functions as a system of social control that constrains women’s agency and self-actualisation. Best in Show is a practice-led, autoethnographic investigation that interrogates this paradox through contemporary painting. The research addresses two central questions: How can contemporary painting critically mediate the mechanisms of beauty as a system of social control? And in what ways can artistic practice facilitate the decentring of appearance from self-worth? By situating the studio process as a form of critical inquiry, the project examines how the aesthetic language of beauty can be reappropriated, exaggerated and disrupted to expose its disciplinary power and psychological effects. For me, horses embody a personal fascination. I rode them as a girl, enchanted by their elegance and strength, symbols of girlhood freedom and care. However, their paradoxical symbolism has historically been harnessed for war, labour, and patriarchal power. These contradictory reflections manifest in two large-scale oil paintings, each measuring one and a half by two metres, drawing upon Rococo sensibility, ornamental excess, and the visual language of judged arenas such as horse shows and pageants. Horses, here deployed as metaphors for the human body and the performance of femininity, occupy a tense, emotionally charged tableau. Their muscular forms recoil from the viewer, straining against reins that bind them, entangled in cycles of conflict and submission while simultaneously struggling for dominance and approval. These interactions reflect both complicity and resistance. Through an interplay of seductive surface and psychic strain, the paintings visualise the contradictions inherent in the pursuit of perfection, revealing how a spectacle of beauty (situations of judgement in relation to appearances) demands performance, comparison, and self-surveillance. Positioned within feminist art discourse alongside artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jenny Saville, Best in Show demonstrates that contemporary painting can both reveal and resist the mechanisms of beauty as social control while opening space for new forms of agency. The research is structured around three intersecting frameworks: conceptual, material, and personal. Firstly, the project is conceptually grounded 2 in feminist theory and the aesthetics of control. Drawing on Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze, and John Berger’s account of internalised objectification, the project interrogates how visual and cultural systems discipline women’s bodies through surveillance and selfregulation. Secondly, to engage and communicate key concepts, I have employed three features: colour (the saturation of pink), style-composition (the carnivalesque), and atmosphere (a Rococo sensibility). The electric pink curtain is simultaneously seductive and satirical, referencing the infantilisation and commodification of beauty under capitalism. The carnivalesque, with its grotesque exaggeration and inversion of order, destabilises aesthetic and social hierarchies. The Rococo, historically associated with luxury and aristocratic display, is reimagined as a contemporary vehicle for feminist critique; its excess becomes a lens through which to question the cultural and emotional economies of prettiness. Finally, the autoethnographic approach situates the project within my lived experience. Through reflective writing and the meditative labour of painting, I confront my own internalised performance of beauty, as well as the habits of self-surveillance, competition, and compliance learned through social, cultural, and patriarchal conditioning. The various horse gestures mirror these personal revelations: the two horses captured midtussle speak to my complicity in perpetuating the gaze; the foal jolted upwards by an older mare visualises the shock of womanhood and the inheritance of feminine performance, while the other horse tugged offstage by an unseen force suggests the invisible systems that regulate self-presentation. Through this reflexive dialogue between theory, material, and self, the studio becomes a place to train and untrain; to acquire skills in painting and research while decentring my appearance from my self-worth.