Penny Slinger is a visionary surrealist who worked in collage, photography, and sculpture to vividly paint her interpretations of the inner and outer female experience. Through her striking and provocative imagery, the viewer gets a glimpse into the feelings of being born into a body demonized by religious belief and fetishized by patriarchy. We all emerge from the womb into a world that teaches us to degrade and despise the very soil we grow upon. Slinger tells these women’s stories of love and lust and tragedy and violence with each of her images, and after more than a decade of notoriety in the British art world, Slinger “disappeared” herself from it, feeling like it was too conservative an environment for what she was trying to accomplish. In 2018, a documentary about her artwork entitled Out of the Shadows brought her work back to an art world that was now ready for blasphemous collages featuring vulvas. Below, check out some of the pages from two of her books, her 1969 series 50% The Visible Woman and her 1977 series An Exorcism.
I feel more akin to Frida Kahlo than any other female artist. She used the language of Surrealism for her own form of intense introspection and self-reflection. From the start, I wanted to apply the techniques opened up by Surrealism to probe and lay bare the female psyche. Similar to Frida, I was not so involved with fantasy, but with plumbing the depths of the subconscious in order to mine the jewels of the inner being and shine some light on them.
Penny Slinger, https://museemagazine.com/features/2017/3/6/penny-singer-dirty-girl
Images © Penny Slinger via pennyslinger.com
AN EXORCISM
50 % – THE VISIBLE WOMAN
