Milady’s Boudoir

Studio 1.1, Redchurch Street, March 2022

So named for Aunt Dahlia’s weekly woman’s magazine in PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, in which Milady’s Boudoir is an irreverent publication that errs on the side of sentimental and doesn’t sell very successfully.

Something in this spoke to me in the formation of this body of work. The aesthetic is feminine, it’s pretty and pink, but the subjects are more taboo, and decidedly not very ladylike. This contradiction between style and subject runs in parallel with contradictions I see in the female experience; the perception of women as Madonna or whore, domestic labourer or career bitch, devout Christian or sexual libertine. Centrally to my practice, I investigate the guilt manifested by this disconnect. I think the domestic, or the female private space is the main site of this struggle, so I locate and investigate it through my work. The Boudoir embodies female private space.

In my research on Boudoir, I was particularly struck by the original intention for the space, which likely started as a room for women to take tea or catch up on correspondence, or generally get away from the madness of housewifery. Being a private space for women, the male imagination, given a platform, has spun a hugely sexual narrative around it. The image of a boudoir as a plush, kitsch sex den interior, is an image perpetuated by French literature of the 18th Century, such as the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir. Set against the exterior stringent moralism of the Catholic Church, the text graphically follows a young girl’s enlightenment to libertinism by way of a sexual education. Sexual liberation is the path to a higher understanding jars with the Catholic idea of prayer and confession as the path to higher understanding. By confessing to sins (sex or course being the original sin) one can be absolved of indiscretions by a priest, who wields the power to redirect you to the path of righteousness. The church doesn’t have this much clout anymore: I can’t think of many of my friends who would count ‘eternal damnation’ on their list of Sunday Scaries. Be this due to Feminism and gender struggles, and the progress that has been made here since the 18th Century in terms of sexual liberation or that now women are too busy juggling unpaid domestic labour with their full-time jobs.  And yet, there is still a lot of shame surrounding female sexuality.

Philosophy of the Boudoir, despite a rambling mid-way discourse on social revolution (easily the dullest part of the text), is primarily intended as an erotic novel. Pornography has only become more widely consumed since Sade’s day. As with boudoir’s, when left to the male imagination of the porn production team, women become mindless sex robots in pink lingerie with a predilection for whips and buttplugs. Out of these hours of viewing, there’s an expectation for women to get home from the office after a long day and upon entry to the private space, shed their outside skin (literally) and transform into hairless, nubile and insatiable creatures of the night. If this is not the reality, as it sometimes isn’t, shame is born. If it is in fact the reality, as it sometimes is, there’s an unfortunate caveat that ‘good girls’ aren’t hairless, nubile, insatiable creatures of the night, so it’s a bit of a lose-lose, and shame is born.

Still, it’s 2022. Women are allowed to be sexual, or not sexual, or whatever they want to be. There are lots of Instagram accounts who have made these statements into banners, so it must be true. The work in Milady’s Boudoir sits somewhere in the middle. Narratives of women dating, kissing and praying, hang in dialogue. Motifs of the classical and of the religious permeate this body of work as a reclamation of the vehicles of male imagination that contributed to the manifestation of this shame. Buttplugs fired in the terracotta of Grecian Urns, elevate narratives of modern dating to the scale of heroic battles with titans. Intimate sized devotional works of Saints and Angels for the domestic space, rather than the chapel, put redemption into a woman’s own hands, rather than that of a priest.

When Men Are Outwitted by Mermaids (Chasing Tail), brings an allegory of the sexualisation of women to a monumental scale, cast in plaster in the relief style of a temple frieze. The narrative of a mythical mermaid, spotted by a sailor, who returns to the pub to tell his mates and then attempts to fish her out with a buttplug as bait, is rendered across three panels. This work, and the works made in preparation for it, shift from a frank and realistic tone to a more mystical, romantic realm, again pushing to highlight the imaginary concept of women as exists in the male gaze. It need not be said that the story does not end with the sailor heroically winning over his mermaid love interest. She isn’t impressed by his offering.

The figures in my work are anonymous, and predominantly pink. They are blank canvases that I hope speak to a collective experience of all who identify as women, finding their place in a quagmire of expectation. I like to think if Aunt Dahlia’s Milady’s Boudoir was running as a publication, these are the stories it would now be telling.