Diana Anastasia Inmaculada
My First Brazilian Wax, (Ibiza. April 2019)
Wax on Canvas

For this performance piece, I used the board as a seat and waxed myself on top of it, catching on the canvas any drips that my inexperienced hands dropped as I was working on my inner thighs.

This was the first time I waxed my bikini area with liquid wax, during the lockdown when beauty salons were shut.

This work consists of a raw, untreated white canvas marked by organic drips and traces of deep red wax. Created during the first COVID-19 lockdown, it documents a private ritual performed in the absence of professional beauty services: the artist sat directly on the canvas while waxing her intimate areas, allowing the wax to fall and harden where it may.

The piece transforms a routine, often burdensome chore—female body maintenance—into a visible, abstract record. What is usually hidden, disposable, and slightly shameful (the pain, the mess, the time spent conforming to standards of smoothness and femininity) is here elevated and made permanent. The red wax, reminiscent of blood or molten flesh, stains the pristine canvas like evidence of an intimate performance. The raw fabric, unprimed and vulnerable, mirrors the exposed body and the unfiltered reality of domestic life under lockdown.

During isolation, the small, habitual labors that structure women's days became magnified. Without salons, gyms, or external validation, these mundane acts—shaving, waxing, plucking, maintaining—revealed themselves as both intimate rituals of self-care and quiet enforcers of societal expectation. Lockdown stripped away the infrastructure that usually renders these chores invisible. Suddenly, the private labor of femininity was laid bare, performed in living rooms and bathrooms, often while juggling work, childcare, or anxiety. This artwork brings those overlooked hours into the foreground: the repetitive, bodily, slightly painful tasks that consume significant portions of a woman's life yet rarely enter cultural conversation.

By displaying the physical residue of this act, the work asserts that life is not only composed of grand events or public achievements, but of these accumulated mundane moments—the hours spent on maintenance, the silent endurance, the private negotiations with our bodies. These are the textures of lived experience. In making the invisible visible and the intimate public, the canvas becomes both a witness and a protest: a quiet record of time spent, discomfort endured, and the everyday performances that shape female existence.

One-phrase description:

"Red wax drips from an intimate lockdown ritual, turning female mundanity into permanent testimony."