Remofiloe Nomandla Mayisela's playful self-portraits cast a makoti as milkmaid and milk, challenging the roles women are handed.
South African artist Remofiloe Nomandla Mayisela is using her own face and body to tear into the expectations placed on women, and the results are as witty as they are sharp. Her photographic series Lipservice centres on Mrs Martha May, a contemporary makoti, the colloquial South African word for a wife, who is always polished, poised and ready to serve.
In the standout image MilkMaid, Mrs May stands before a wall of long-life milk cartons. Her face is painted with the patches of a dairy cow, a crate sits balanced on her head, and she wears rubber gloves and a frilled apron over shweshwe fabric. Milkmaid and milk, server and served, all folded into a single figure.
The concept starts with the old saying that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. In Lipservice, Mayisela turns the kitchen into a stage and food into the script women are expected to follow. Milk, she says, felt like the most intimate ingredient: the first thing a woman gives, and one of the easiest to package and sell back.
Even the carton design becomes part of the joke. Terms like long life, full cream and UHT read like a job description, built to last on a shelf. Stacked in repetition, the cartons point to how women are consumed, branded and treated as endlessly replaceable.
By putting herself in front of the lens, Mayisela flips the gaze and invites audiences to laugh, then think hard about the roles they have inherited. It is bold, funny and unmistakably South African storytelling, and it is part of a growing wave of African women artists rewriting the narrative on their own terms.
