Femme

Catherine Harper
UK 2000

Coast US feminist artists, revisited by key artists of the 1990’s. Exploration of vulval imageries allows me to consider female desire, seduction and discipline, and the role-liquidity of queer sexual play.

The metaphorical cultural veil of a socially/culturally formed feminine is materialized in my use of empty but sexually encoded garments (the little black velvet dress. lingerie, leather, corsetry, gloves) to stand in for the female body. A self-consciously feminist erotic is proposed, carefully controlled through allusion to the actual body, through textual ‘cunning lingua’, through acknowledgment of the seductive territories of sado-masochism, fetishism, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and through awareness of the potentially mulitiplicitous desirous nature of the gaze.