Women behind the lens: ‘I learned early what I was meant to become: a wife, a cook, a keeper of the home’

The South African artist Remofiloe Nomandla Mayisela questions the role she was expected to fulfil in her playful self-portraits MilkMaid is part of my photographic series Lipservice, which stars Mrs Martha May, a contemporary makoti (a colloquial South African term for a wife). Mrs May is always dolled up, poised, ready to serve. Here she stands before a wall of long-life milk, face painted in the patches of a dairy cow, a crate balanced on her head. Rubber gloves, a frilled apron over shweshwe (coloured fabric). Milkmaid and milk, server and served, in one body. The idea grows from the old line: the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. In Lipservice the kitchen is a stage with food the script women are handed. Milk felt like the most intimate ingredient, the first thing a woman gives and the easiest to package and sell back. The carton reads like a job description: long life, full cream, UHT process. Made to last on a shelf. Stacked in repetition, the cartons speak to how women are consumed: branded, endlessly replaceable. Continue reading...