In looking for “culprits” in the representation of women, I was drawn to the Barbie doll and its paraphernalia. Life in plastic, it’s fantastic explores the dominance and enforcement of unnatural body shaping on women. The Barbie doll literally cannot stand on its own two feet, yet is an icon to many girls and young women – so much so that

the “doll … may have shaped their perceptions of female beauty” (Origianska, 2018: online). Barbie was in fact inspired by the blonde, blue-eyed comic-strip character Lilli, who was created in 1952 and was not originally intended for children. Her emergence in the wake of World War II brings into focus the brutality of the Holocaust and
its pursuit of the so-called perfection of the Aryan race. “Barbie’s birth stems from a fetish of German otherness that, ironically enough, manifested itself in the plethora of sex dolls inspired by Lilli in sex shops across Germany” (Kotomori, 2019: online).

For this work I found images of discarded Barbies – broken, used and up for resale on Facebook Marketplace. These images segued, in my mind, into the disregard, disrespect, disposability and con- scious muting of women.

I sanded, dissolved with acetone and glazed the lower half of the canvas in quinocodrone pink, visually separating the work’s com- position into two halves to create a sense of unease. The colours emphasise the disconnection between flesh and plastic to symbolise the questionable underbelly of the origin of these products.