Bodily Objects: Curated by Philomena Epps

In 1973, Penny Slinger initiated the Bride’s Cake Series, in which she represented herself as both bride and wedding cake. Her spread legs an allusion to the ritual of cutting the ceremonial slice, the images destabilised the object-subject binary by fashioning the female body as a symbolic, consumable item. Slinger’s longstanding interest in the Surrealists can be gleaned by her early collages, such as Don’t look at me (1969), while her later works made with Xerox are infused with an iconography of eroticism and plenty, mixing full frontal prints of her naked body with bouquets of roses and bunches of grapes.

Renate Bertlmann began using rubber teats and condoms in the late 1970s, surveying their sensual textures and visual potential as substitutions for genitalia and erogenous zones. Akin to ready-made objects, the latex teats were also grafted onto wearable items, such as the crown of udder-like nipples in Tender Christ (1977), or protruding from the disturbing mask worn in Tender Pantomime (1978). These photographs, captured from performances she staged in the privacy of her studio, illustrate Bertlmann’s engagement with tenderness and aggression, uneasily oscillating between seduction and horror.