An experiment in treating cockroaches as cosmetics. Their legs are removed and attached as eyebrows, and can be made to move through electrical stimulation.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” This line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth suggests that beauty and ugliness, cleanliness and dirt, are relative values whose meanings depend on one another. People put on makeup to become beautiful and stamp on cockroaches because they consider them ugly. I find cockroaches grotesque, but not ugly; I can even find them beautiful.
This work brings what is considered dirty—the cockroach—into what is considered beautiful—makeup. Removing the legs and making them move through electrical stimulation intensifies their disturbing qualities. Using those moving legs as cosmetics then turns that extreme into something intended to be beautiful.
While making the work, I lost my certainty about what beauty means. Yet the cockroaches remained beautiful to me, perhaps more clearly than before. I do not claim that cockroaches are inherently beautiful; beauty and ugliness are relative. But I feel this work can make us reconsider each through the other.
Finalist, CREATIVE HACK AWARD 2019.