We are pleased to announce that joining PILAA’s creative leg of the business, is the acclaimed British artist, Dawn Woolley. Woolley’s artistic practice encompasses performance, photography, video, and installation, blurring the boundary between self-portraiture and still-life. In Woolley’s practice, described as a feminist critique, she examines her experiences as a neoliberal subject in contemporary consumer culture and the processes of constructing ideal gendered bodies through a queer, feminist and anti-capitalist lens.

This began with an examination of naturalized gender performance and idealized representations of femininity in early works such as The Substitute (Holiday), 2007-8. In her still-life work, she attempts to describe the idealized, gendered, ageing body through commodities. She also creates public domain interventions in physical commercial advertising spaces in cities and in virtual ones, on online social networking sites.

Dawn is also a research fellow, with an active profile. She is the solo author of “Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification”, published in 2022 by Bloomsbury and other recent publications include: “The Quantified Self, The Ideology of Health and Fat”, in The Body Productive, London: Bloomsbury, 2023; and “The Dissecting Gaze: Fashioned Bodies on Social Networking Sites”, in Revisiting the Gaze: Feminism, Fashion and the Female Body, (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

As part of the PILAA team, she will be lending her artistic craft to our EDI campaigns, making her the perfect PILAA Artist to work with on all projects and briefs dealing with gender, consumer culture, still life and self-portraiture.