The Natural Forms. Parts I, II, III

A series of works developed in three parts for three venues addresses gender constructions and economics. In Part I, large format photographs show women in negligés adopting certain gestures and forms. Taken from ‘modern’ magazines of the 1950s in which the latest French ladies’ undergarments are introduced, these women correspond to those cited in a footnote in the second chapter of Capital, which offers women as part of the display of commodities in the market-place, suggesting that standardised productions of the female body use stereotypical poses and views to produce seductive patterns and desires. Foxes, naturalised – more natural than Nature and good citizens – carry silk negligees in their jaws and paws. In Part II, women in bed-jackets (liseuses), copied from French lingerie magazines and annotated, may not be ‘femmes folles de leur corps, after the footnote in Capital, as the red ribbons around their necks and the red covers of their reading matter indicate more is at stake than indolence and luxury. Tracts in the pink paper of the Financial Times, the title of each drawn from Capital, show women as corps morcelés, extended captions describing fabric and ornamentation in lingering detail. The commodity is feminine, exchanged and accruing value in that exchange, followed in the work Mademoiselle la Marchandise in Part III. In correspondence with large-format portraits of anonymous women, films and embellished objects and drawings appear, and also an unusual menagerie of weasels, foxes, and squirrels, leading metaphorical lives in each exhibition while performing different functions, as readers, agents, and provocateurs. The function of images of women in the economic theory and social reality of capitalist systems is explored in relation to education through reading (theory) and direct action (practice). Reading and politics are evoked and feminised, coalescing around a footnote in Capital and its translations (and shifts in meaning) according to edition. Notes: 1. Works from the series have been acquired for the public collection of the Dieselkraftwerkmuseum. 2. The feminist journal Out of the Box commissioned a work for its Winter issue, no. 6, 2016: Madame la Marchandise.