An Anti-Racism Sculpture

My first project at London College of Communications was on Racism. The brief? To create a piece of work to promote anti-racism. This is a subject that can be so cliché and it is so broad, so the aim of the brief was to narrow the subject down to one specific category. Naturally, I chose the fashion and beauty industries. 

The fashion and beauty industries are two industries rife with racism: black and Asian models used more as a "token" model than as normality such as white models. Design houses blame the fact that there are less multi-cultural models on catwalks now then in the 70s because there are less of them - a statement that is clearly untrue. In addition, beauty companies usually choose a white woman as the face of their campaigns and their range of make-up for women of a diverse range of cultures can be frankly pathetic.

My work was inspired by the work of The Diversity Coalition, an organisation set up by Bethann Hardison, Naomi Campbell and Iman; three black supermodels (or ex-supermodels) who are highly influential to the fashion industry. This August, The Diversity Coalition sent out letters to all of the governing bodies of the fashion capitals, confronting racism in the industry and on the catwalk. It was this that led me to do my own investigation into make-up brands and look into whether they supplied a diverse range of foundation shades for all women.

However, when touring Oxford Street department stores I was struck more by the names that beauty brands use on their foundation labels. Names like "Espresso", "Cappuccino", "Walnut" and "Vanilla" were but a few used to obviously try and divert using names that obviously labelled skin colour. I was shocked. As a woman, I don't want to be labelled a food-name and I don't want to be categorised. 

I tried to portray this through photography, one of my favourite mediums, but the final piece led to sculpture. A sculpture of six shop-bought bottles filed to the brim with each food that represented a foundation name and labelled. My aim was to show the make-up companies what these names really meant and that women shouldn't be labelled as such.

Ruby