Eva Dixon, Yulia Mahr and How Women Are Built

I headed to Chiltern street to catch Eva Dixon’s solo show “Crash” at Incubator last week and then happened to see that Yulia Mahr was doing a book signing next door and my lord, these two shows side by side, they did a thing. These two women, in two totally different ages and stages of their careers, are looking at the female body as a sculpted construction. And isn’t that one of the oldest stories in Western art history where the female body is not a lived experience, but a surface ideal or fantasy? It is the story of the female body as a material to be perfected, fragmented, and ultimately consumed. And isn’t it the oldest story in our experience of navigating the world as women who have been bombarded by a media that perfects, shrinks, and polishes our bodies into being? 

It surely is “The Story” for many of us. Women have spent generations negotiating profoundly complicated relationships with our bodies against the backdrop of impossible images and constantly shifting ideals. Entire industries have been built around convincing women to shrink, correct, tone, smooth, erase, preserve, or somehow transcend the realities of inhabiting a body at all. For decades the ideal female form has oscillated wildly while always being strangely unattainable. One moment we demand thinness, the next strength, then softness, then agelessness, then effortless “wellness.” Women have been asked to perform contradictory versions of femininity simultaneously. We are to be desirable but controlled, visible but not excessive, natural but perfected. And though our bodies, of course, change (women much more than men) through age, stress, motherhood, labour, and hormones,  contemporary image culture leaves very little room for the reality of that experience.  While we swell, scar, soften, harden, carry, nourish, and endure, we are surrounded by images that flatten the body into something endlessly editable and consumable.

Which is perhaps why these exhibitions feel so emotionally charged. Both Yulia Mahr and Eva Dixon capture something of the psychological mess of all of that. They speak to the vulnerability of being looked at and the pressure of self-construction. There’s a strange tension between wanting to disappear and wanting to be seen fully, that these women play with in their work. And what feels most powerful in both practices is that they do not resolve those contradictions. They expose them, and leave the seams visible.  And perhaps that is what resonates so deeply. Not perfection, but a recognition of the hard reality. These shows capture the complexity of contemporary womanhood materialised, deconstructed, and finally place it in front of us to examine rather than simply absorb.