In which Alex Michon visits three London shows with a focus on the female
Penny Slinger, Exorcism: Inside and Out
‘Prince Charming, Prince Charming’, Rapunzel replied,
‘I have no intention of being your bride.
We will not get married. We will not elope.
I’ve cut off my hair and I’ve braided a rope.'
Following on the heels of the Tate’s blockbuster Women in Revolt, London is witnessing a recherché des femmes perdue moment, forgotten feministas foraged out from the field of forgetfulness are taking their rightful place on the art stage. One such artist is Penny Slinger, who was featured in the Tate show. Slinger graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 1969, having developed a visual language she describes as ‘feminist surrealism’ she explores the notion of the feminine subconscious and psyche, using her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity.
In Exorcism: Inside and Out, her solo show at Richard Saltoun, slinger presents what she describes as ‘a surreal romance in photo collage’, representing what she has called her ‘deepest excavations’ as an artist. This work transforms the gallery into a totally immersive psychodynamic space with wall length photo collages enhanced by tangled vines running from the ceiling and trailing along the floor. In this strange fairy story forest, the women in the photo collages are reminiscent of the dreamlike groupings of models in the work of fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. As my current research encompasses both 1970’s fashion magazines and fairy stories I felt a deep connection.
Slinger’s collages in the exhibition appeared to represent a young woman’s journey towards self-actualization. Many spaces are dominated by phallocentric symbolism — in He Crows, He Crows, an oversized head of a cock pokes out from round a corner, while in Tribunal, a naked female figure stands exposed, surrounded by an all-dressed all-male jury. These are counterbalanced by images where the female protagonist comes into her feminine power such as in A Rose by Any Other Name, with a bright red gigantic rose spreading its petals between a woman’s naked thighs, and Through the Glass which features a tender communion of entangled women. There are many images of stylish brides which appear to have been left at the altar — one of which is predominately featured in the accompanying video. However, I read this supposed abandonment as a rejection of the marital myth of the happily ever after.
In a ‘Feminist Study of Tangled’, in the European Academic Research journal (May 2015) Mubeen Khalid explores how the Disney adaptation diverges from the Grimm Brothers Rapunzel and breaks away from previous patriarchal Disney representations. In the original fairytale Rapunzel is a stereotypical damsel in distress who needs to be rescued by a hero. Tangled presents an independent heroine who: ‘neither wants to spend her whole life in the tower, but nor is she interested in eloping with prince charming, rather she is ambitious to see the floating lanterns and life outside the tower’. The stereotype of masculinity is also challenged in Tangled when men show feminine qualities, such as when the King cries. The very title of the film is genderless. This rhymes with Slinger’s assertion in the show’s press release that the ‘journey of the embodied soul is not sexist; we all, male and female alike, need to discover who we are. It is like a detective story, in which we both, protagonists and victims, must follow the clues and unravel the plot’.
Slinger’s collages are set within the spectral, crumbling grandeur of Lilford Hall, a Jacobean pile in Northamptonshire (which reminded me of the gothic Manderley in Rebecca). Using posed photographs of herself, her girlfriend Suzanka Fraey and her ex-boyfriend, the filmmaker Peter Whitehead, Slinger uses the building as a metaphor for the psyche, describing the process as one of self-psychoanalysis. In the language of dreams a house represents the personality with the various rooms signifying its various aspects.
Slinger’s Exorcism was also the inspiration for her collaboration for Dior’s autumn/winter 2019 Haute Couture show. In a celebration of the clients, friends and seamstresses who make up the story of the House of Dior, Slinger fabricated a huge tree which inhabited the stairwell of the show, photographs from her worldwide travels adorned every surface with textures of fire, water, air and earth. For the runway she also designed a wearable gold doll’s house covered in 24 carat gold leaf which embodied the gold of the alchemical journey ‘which opened to rival the body of the woman within’.
This is how I like my feminism, with aesthetically engaging fairytale subplots, and fashion references subtly incorporating anti-patriarchal messages. Slinger’s work has a fearlessly fresh and contemporary feel. So much of historical feminist art appears to embody a fear of female beauty, often disfiguring it to make its point. For me it is this fear which has been exorcised from Slinger’s work and as a result the point is made all the stronger.
France-Lise McGurn, Strawberry
‘What are little girls made of?
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice
That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of’
Strawberry, France-Lise McGurn’s first solo show at Massimodecarlo, is another immersive exhibition with joyously pastel-coloured paintings, both on canvas and rendered directly onto the walls. McGurn’s work is irreverently cute and sexy. Fearlessly sensual and not afraid of being pretty. As the artist says, ‘everything is strawberry flavour, it’s the sweetener’ – medicine, vapes, condoms, ice cream, lip gloss. Here sweet strawberries are symbolic of desire, pleasure and sexuality whilst subverting ideas around the erotics of painting, psychosexual imagery, Britishness (think strawberries and cream) and different facets of contemporary living.
Former glamour model and nurse Abi Titmuss is cited by McGurn as a muse for many of the paintings (if not all of them). Titmuss is a signifier of that peculiar ‘slap and tickle’ prurient British curiosity. Here McGurn disrupts this to make Abi the star of her show, reclaiming her femininity divesting it from any pornographic intent. The fluidity and sketchiness of the paintings hover like half remembered dreams. Disney also makes an appearance here in paintings of a little deer — Faline, one of Bambi’s childhood friends from the 1942 animated film, an image that also evokes Babycham.
The gallery is dominated by a sparkling chandelier and in the middle of one of the rooms a series of tete-a-tete, worn and paint smeared, white chairs, add to the cute salon style suggestions of glamour, sex and subculture.
In much art theory, ornamental imagery is regarded as artificial, naive and misleading. Rosemary Galt, writing in Pretty, Film and the Decorative Image (2011), contradicts these notions seeing them as a reactionary position which can be traced back through Western history to the anti-visual scepticism of Plato’s rejection of the image as a false phantom of the philosophical idea. For Galt, this rejection of the pretty – the colourful and the seductive – is ‘yet another patriarchal rejection of the feminine’.
McGurn’s joyously decorative and slightly subversive images, redolent of sun-bleached Californian mansions, present a lusciously fresh take on the power of the pretty to subvert and disturb notions of the feminine in painting.
Jacqueline Utley, Mirror Flower Mother
‘The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture in terms of poetic examinations of lived experiences. Focusing on the personal and emotional responses to buildings and domestic spaces, he sees the home not so much as a space of inhabitation, but as a hidey-hole for imaginative day dreaming, and the place where we keep our earliest emotional and psychological furniture.
Many of Jacqueline Utley’s paintings in Mirror Flower Mother encompass a similar contextual emphasis to what Bachelard defined as ‘intimate immensity’. Utley’s paintings are located within a feminine topophilia of gendered spaces that women have occupied for living, working and making work. In Sisters, Flowers, Mothers, groups of women are depicted sewing, sitting, chatting or daydreaming, the ceiling opens out onto a star filled sky whilst a white dove and a bunch of white flowers in the left corner of the composition add to a feeling of contemplative stillness.
Utley’s paintings do not shout or scream, they represent nonetheless an alternative vision of feminine strength and power, that of collaboration and dreaming. Utley has talked about how she started making these paintings in response to women painters in museum collections born around the start of the twentieth century. Engaging in collaborative practice-based research projects on work by overlooked artists, Utley also works with the artist Hayley Field as Obscure Secure, conducting research into women artists in public collections to widen understanding of underrepresentation.
The echoes of early 20th century painting can be detected in Utley’s paintings but only lightly, the influences appearing as faint echoes. These paintings with their stillness and studied quietude also have a quixotic spell binding magic where musings seem to come to life. For all their silence, Utley has stated that in her paintings she often starts out with imagining what the conversations of her female figures could be about. The painter’s own family history of women working in textile mills has fed into her interest in researching women workers from the early part of the century.
Flowers are recurring themes in the paintings; flowers in vases from earlier works often appear in her work, suddenly unmoored from their vases they magically float through the liminal spaces. They stand in as reminders of the space outside the paintings and aesthetic signifiers of what Bachelard calls ‘poetic consciousness’. For Bachelard the desire to make images is a basic human drive, the creative imagination seeks to transcend what is, to transform reality into poetry. As Bachelard states ‘If we see leaf, flower, and fruit within the bud, this means that we are seeing with the eyes of our imagination. It seems that here the imagination is a wild hope of unbounded seeing.’ Thus, Utley’s flowers can be understood to add multiple flights of imaginative musings and interpretations alongside her female groupings.
Quoting the French Poet Oscar Milosz, Bachelard references the house as a metaphor for mother which also chimes with Utley’s title for the show:
‘I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House.
House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood.’
All three of the shows visited and discussed here, have each in their own ways, presented subversive, unexpected and aesthetically intriguing aspects of femininity.
From the roses bursting out of Slinger’s thighs, to McGurn’s suggested sweetness of strawberries, to Utley’s floating dream-like flowers, may a thousand blossoms of feminine definitions continue to bloom!
Alex Michon
Penny Slinger - Exorcism: Inside and Out
Richard Saltoun, London
3 July - 7 September 2024
France-Lise McGurn - Strawberry
Massimodecarlo, London
5 September - 2 October 2024
Jacqueline Utley - Mirror Flower Mother
Niru Ratnam, London
30 August - 28 September 2024
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