Rachel Maclean wants to make you feel uncomfortable. A Scottish multimedia artist known for her hallucinatory, violently pink aesthetic – her latest film, Make Me Up, sees women pitted against each other in a Big Brother-esque dystopia to be crowned the most beautiful.

Maclean’s work satirises the excesses of consumer culture, seducing her audience into feeling complicit in the nightmare unfolding onscreen. Her VR work, ‘I’m Terribly Sorry’ positions viewers in a post-apocalyptic Britain, with the power to kill passersby with a mobile phone. Her 2017 response to Brexit and the presidential election, ‘Spite Your Face’, depicts a Pinocchio protagonist peddling a perfume called ‘Untruth’ until he eventually rapes someone with his nose.

Maclean’s aesthetic is so bright and bubblegummy you almost want to eat it – and that just makes the revolting things that happen on screen more disconcerting. Maclean tells me the aim is to allure and unsettle: “I want viewers to feel like what they’re doing is a little bit wrong”

Maclean plays almost all of the characters in her work herself, using make-up and prosthetics to transform into a burnished gold goddess; a grotesque blue rat; a noseless yellow Katy-Perry-type demi-God. In August 2017, she dressed up as a huge furry red bunny to romp through the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham. Where the history of art has been characterised by men taking women as their subjects, Maclean uses her own body, refiguring it to upset and confront. Her protagonist in ‘Make Me Up’, Siri, ends up using make-up in a similar way: deforming her face becomes a way to escape surveillance and ultimately liberate herself.

In person, Maclean is unexpectedly quiet and polite. I sat down with her to talk about ugliness, dressing up as arrogant men, and why she’s so obsessed with noses.

Rather than just dismissing make-up as something slight or superficial, you present it in your work as a tool for a kind of feminist revolution. Why?
Rachel Maclean: Make-up can be a method of control. I explore that in ‘Make Me Up’ when the character of Siri isn’t allowed to leave her room without it. There’s that sense of needing make-up in order to appear presentably female. I get asked by the newspapers a lot, “Why do you use so much girly pink?” They’re like: I’m supposed to be taking this seriously because this is art, but all the signifiers are telling me it’s silly and feminine. I consciously court that discomfort now because we need to challenge the idea that serious things must look masculine. So Siri ends up being liberated by her use of make-up. For me, on a personal level but also on a political one, there’s something powerful about using to achieve ugliness. You’re pushing your intention in another direction. Beauty is about balance and care; but with the grotesque, you can just keep adding. I love that.

For women, dressing up can be a way to fit the role society has assigned us: to ‘look presentably female’ as you say; or to adapt to our surroundings to make those around us comfortable. You work with your own body to toggle between identities in that historically female way, but you transform yourself into something confrontational. Is that deliberate?
Rachel Maclean: Absolutely. I want people to feel uncomfortable. A lot of the characters I play are goddess figures, but I’ll work to make something about them subtly unsettling. In my film, ‘It’s What’s Inside That Counts’, I dressed up as a disgusting rat. I wore contact lenses, I wrapped three duvets around my body and I had hair sprouting out of my face and into my eyes and this snout I couldn’t really breathe through. It’s bizarre to look in the mirror and see almost nothing of yourself. Achieving the opposite of glamour in that quite baroque way gave me a cheeky feeling. I also love playing arrogant men. There’s something about imitating characters who you find a bit odious that’s empowering.

Because being able to embody them is a form of control?
Rachel Maclean: Yes, I feel like that when I steal people’s voices as well. In my piece ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, I used the Queen’s real voice and mimed along to it. It’s a slight upset to the power dynamic to steal the voice of a powerful person and put it into a different context. I guess dressing up as a powerful person is laughing at power. There’s a sense that humour is something light but I don’t think it ever is. You’re always laughing at someone. That’s the way that humour has been used by men – you know, mother in law jokes – women have been on some level the butt of the joke. The cultural fear of funny women is the fear that they will laugh at men. That discomfort we feel with funny women – with women not just being there to be laughed at – excites me.

At the very end of ‘Make Me Up’ the main character Siri frees herself from the oppressive regime she is living under, falls in love and gets fat. It’s interesting because it’s almost like you’re suggesting that the only situation a woman could put on weight and not care would be a post-apocalyptic one. What was the rationale behind that?
Rachel Maclean: The audio for ‘Make Me Up’ comes from Kenneth Clarke’s ‘Civilisation’. The polemic of that programme is that you’d rather be civilised than barbarian. I was interested in turning that on its head: who is the beneficiary of this hierarchical political and social system? And who would actually be liberated if civilisation did fall apart? Weight and eating is an anxiety for most women at some point in their lives. It’s something that should be politicised, but we are reluctant to connect it to any of the pressures that come from outside us. We make it something interior and shameful. I was interested in creating a scenario where we’re liberated from that sense of control around weight and eating. I love the idea of Siri and Alexa living together in this civilisation that is free tyranny.

Your 2017 film ‘Spite Your Face’ is a response to Brexit and the US Presidential election. A lot of your work is about collective experience: of weight consciousness, or consumerism, or – in that case – post-truth politics. Why do those experiences interest you?
Rachel Maclean: ‘Spite Your Face’ was shown in Venice, and I felt at the time there was an almost direct cross-over between the experience of wonder you get in that city with the religious art and the experience of awe you get in the luxury shops. It seems to be within the same visual language. I’m drawn to perfume particularly because, while consumerism lies to you a lot, perfume really lies to you. Charlize Theron in gold walking through a beautiful palace: the implication is, if you buy this, you get this life. Despite that being completely illogical, there is some kind of suspension of disbelief that allows you, at some almost magical level, to think: If I spray this on me I’ll be transformed. It’s absurd but there’s some kind of collective religious experience in that. I like to create immersive experiences, too. I’ve been working with VR recently, where you can really make an audience member feel complicit in the emotions of the piece; or even genuinely responsible for what’s happening in the piece. I think it’s an interesting thing to make an audience member feel like what they’re doing is a little bit wrong.

I’ve noticed that noses play a big part to play in your work. Why is that?
Rachel Maclean: For a while, I was obsessed with eggs. Now it’s noses. There’s the obvious thing: it’s a phallic symbol. The fear of losing your nose in ‘Spite Your Face’ becomes a fear of castration. But I am also interested in the nose job thing. I got really into vlogs and I noticed so many of them follow a similar narrative: you have a female vlogger who gets a bit of a following, and then at a certain point in her career she becomes obsessed with her nose and decides to get plastic surgery. I suppose it’s a combination of getting older and realising that the currency that they have is built around the way that they look. The nose job is almost something they have to do to maintain their sex appeal or identity or some strange brand.

One of the strangest, funniest moments of ‘Make Me Up’ is when a woman undergoes plastic surgery and she’s left trapped in the fleshy form of a Henry Moore sculpture. Do you see a line between the objectification of women by male artists and the violence of plastic surgery?
Rachel Maclean: Yes definitely. I was interested in seeing it as a kind of violence. I don’t object to plastic surgery in an abstract sense. Like, you can do lots of fun things with plastic surgery. But in almost every case, women just get their noses smaller and try to achieve this very homogenous beauty. I think so much of that is down to the way that as women, we internalise the violence of objectification so that we almost have it within us. Seemingly, of our own free will, we enact that violence against ourselves.

Make Me Up
Written, designed, edited and directed by Rachel Maclean
Starring Rachel Maclean, Christina Gordon, Colette Dalal Tchantcho
Music Scott Twynholm
Director of Photography David Liddell
VFX Supervisor Jason Hillier
Line Producer Carolynne Sinclair Kidd
Executive Producers Sud Basu, Mark Bell, Clara Glynn, David Harron, Mark Thomas, Jenny Waldman
Producers John Archer, Angus Farqhuar