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.

I was raised in a strong matriarchal household. I learned early what a woman is meant to become: a wife, a cook, a keeper of the home. My work began there, with coming of age and the quiet curriculum of the perfect woman. Who wrote it?

Mrs May is less an alter ego than an extension of that role I was raised to rehearse, played out loud.

I direct, style and do my own makeup, gather the props, set the self-timer and step into frame. Kitsch and pop colour keep it playful, so humour invites people close before they notice what they are looking at. The pinks are sweet. The idea underneath is not.

The term Makoti is popularly traced to the Afrikaans maak ons tee – “make us tea” – naming the wife as the one who serves.

Self-portraiture is how I tell this story honestly. The work speaks to many women, but I can only testify from my own body. It is auto-ethnography in a costume. She watches you watch her, and the gaze turns back to ask who the performance is really for.

Lipservice was the entry point. My practice is an ongoing investigation into the performance of womanhood, and the makoti is the role on a pedestal, held up as the ultimate goal, or so they say. That inquiry continues through my current research and a new body of work, Aftertaste.

MilkMaid laughs, but it also asks you to taste what you are being served. A bite of truth.