Dawn Woolley’s artistic practice encompasses performance, photography, video, and installation. She examines contemporary consumer culture and the process of constructing ideal gendered bodies through commodification and she is particularly interested in new mechanisms of interaction afforded by new technologies such as smart phones and social media. Her work is a feminist critique of representations of gender in adverts, magazines, tv programmes and on social media. It blurs the boundary between self-portraiture and still-life, producing inanimate bodies and seemingly animate objects. She also creates public domain interventions in physical commercial advertising spaces in cities and in virtual ones on online social networking sites, hoping to challenge advertising cultures in the commercial advertising spaces that her work critiques. 

This talk will draw together key artworks and ideas in relation to Woolley’s book, Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification, published by Bloomsbury on 6th October 2022.