source: frieze

If you have never heard of Penelope Slinger, you’re forgiven: her last solo exhibition in the UK was nearly 40 years ago. In 1969, when she was 21 and fresh from a diploma at Chelsea College, several of her ‘3D objects’ were included in the group exhibition ‘Young and Fantastic’ at the ICA, alongside artists like Clive Barker, who presented his sculpture Homage to Magritte (1968). Slinger also appropriated the iconography of Surrealism and, over the next ten years, she gained critical attention for her provocative collage books. There were two major exhibitions of her work at Angela Flowers Gallery, the second of which, in 1973, was the subject of an article by Laura Mulvey in the feminist magazine Spare Rib celebrating the artist’s ‘graphic images of phantasy which only a woman could have produced’. Yet when Slinger left the UK in 1979 – heading first to New York and then later to the Caribbean, where she made paintings about the ancient Arawak culture – she fell into relative obscurity. It was 30 years before she was ‘rediscovered’, when she was included in two major group exhibitions in the autumn of 2009: ‘Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism’ at Manchester Art Gallery and ‘The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art’ at Tate St Ives. Only now is she enjoying a renaissance of her own: her solo exhibition at Riflemaker, titled ‘Hear What I Say (1971–1977)’, ran concurrently with a second, ‘An Exorcism Revisited’, at Broadway 1602 in New York.

Seventeen photographic collages and 11 sculptures were spread across two floors, with some of the more provocative works hung downstairs, although the division was subtle, since Slinger’s naked, nubile body features recurrently. The politics of eroticism courses through them all. Take the collage Giving You Lip (1973), which is as punchy as the title suggests: a seductive open mouth, the hallmark of the femme fatale (and complete with Marilyn mole), has been cut-and-pasted to reveal a recess of further mouths within, closing in on a central pout.It should be enticing – a pair of lipspuckering towards a kiss, caught in split-second frames – yet the image is horrific, a mouth that seems to be suffocated by mouths, an orifice choked by all the projected fantasies of the onlooker. The work belongs to a series of collages made that year, including I Hear What You Say (used to great effect for the catalogue cover), which comprises a delicate ear positioned within an open mouth, a pearl-studded lobe overlapping the lower lip like the tip of a tongue. These are pithy works in which the scoured line to the lips – a remnant of the razor blade – reminds the viewer that Slinger can bite.

The puns are more laboured in the sculptural works, such as Key-Chained (1973), which has chains hanging from a mannequin’s head like Cleopatra braids, while a small key is glued to her lips. Slinger’s imagination seems to have worked best in photo-collages, which could remain porous to her filmic influences. A participant in the all-women theatre group Holocaust, and the art director for Jane Arden’s film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), she was also the partner of filmmaker Peter Whitehead, who published her books. The second of these, An Exorcism (1977), was represented here in a number of works that show how Slinger used Max Ernst’s great photo-romances, such as La femme 100 têtes (Woman with 100 Heads, 1929), to model her own mise-en-scène, which she staged in the abandoned mansion Lilford Hall, using the stately architecture as a foil for her physique in the manner of early female Surrealists like Claude Cahun. These are oneiric images that are best seen, as intended, in a cascade of illustrated pages. However, when mounted on the wall, they become historical objects that give a more vivid sense of the moment when, as Mulvey recognized, artists like Slinger used sexuality ‘not just to portray its conventional surface but to express the hidden desires and fears which warp and govern it’.
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source: riflemakerorg

The art and the life of Penelope Slinger (b.1947 London) are inextricably interwoven. Hear What I Say is the second of three exhibitions focussing on the artist’s early output; photographic collages, objects and sculptural works from the 1970s. In 2009, her collages were exhibited at Tate St Ives as part of The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in Modern Art, Tate, and in Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists & Surrealism, Manchester Art Gallery.

In these pieces, Slinger uses the tools provided by Surrealism to penetrate the female psyche, presenting herself as both subject and object in a group of collages and montages which sidestep the then current themes of 1960s and 70s art. Exhibited in London in 1977, the work’s explicit depiction of ‘feminine power’ and its anarchic approach to life, challenged and provoked many of her peers as well as the critics. The artist left Britain in 1979, never to return; the Riflemaker exhibition being the first time the work will have been shown publicly in almost forty years.

Initially published in book form under the title An Exorcism, the photo-collage series, seven years in the making, was created in the tradition of the classical ‘photo-romance’, taking its cue from Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonte and La Femme 100 Têtes. In these works the artist explores the ultimate romance – the death and rebirth of Self. The action takes place in a deserted country mansion, the empty rooms of which represent the many chambers of a woman’s being. Each image is a meditation on a particular state of consciousness. It represents a place where the lines between the world of dream and that of so-called ‘reality’ are undefined, as the subconscious is opened to the light of conscious scrutiny.

The series follows on from Slinger’s first photo-book 50% The Visible Woman (1971) and the showing of her 3D works at the ICA’s Young and Fantastic exhibition in 1969, when the artist was aged twenty-one. The final collection of the period, Mountain Ecstasy (1978), achieved a unique combination of the erotic and the mystical.

The narrative of this series has a ‘mise-en-scène’ which can be attributed to the artist’s work with the all-women theatre troupe Holocaust (1971) and Slinger’s appearance in and art direction of the feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (d. Jane Arden: now re-issued in a special edition by the BFI). In that year she also worked on the production and design for Picasso’s play The Four Little Girls at the Open Space Theatre, London, at the same time developing an interest in Tantric Art which would guide her artistic and spiritual direction throughout the 1980s. She was named Woman of the Year in New York 1982, other recipients of the award being film director and union organiser Ellen Burstyn and US Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick. The artist describes her output as a “map of the journey of the Self”. Surrealism allowed her to delve into the subconscious and emerge with archetypal glyphs. The next logical step for the artist was to include Tantric and Visionary influences which brought a further dimension to her artistic journey. She has, since then, woven her own mode of Surrealism together with a radical approach to spiritual energy forming a bridge from the subconscious to the superconscious, the realm of unlimited potential.
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source: pennyslinger

Penny Slinger is a surrealist artist. She produced 50%-The Visible Woman (1971) and An Exorcism (1977), two collections of powerful and haunting collages. Her 2D collages and 3D installations incorporated images and lifecasts of herself. Her media during this period included pencil and paint, printmaking, life casts and other 3-dimensional constructions, as well as photography, film and collage.

Penny Slinger is also known for her erotic and Tantric work and her Caribbean/Amerindian work. She created the Secret Dakini Oracle, re-released as the Tantric Dakini Oracle. She is the co-author, illustrator or artist of the following books including Sexual Secrets- The Alchemy of Ecstasy, The Path of the Mystic Lover, Mountain Ecstasy, The Erotic Sentiment in the Paintings of India and Nepal, and The Erotic Sentiment in the Paintings of China and Japan.

From 1980 to 1994, she lived in the Carribbean and was deeply influenced by and influenced the local culture… ancient and modern. She did extensive paintings of the extinct Arawak people- the original inhabitants of the Caribbean. This work can be seen in the Arawak gallery. Her modern Carribbean work is featured in the Island art gallery. Her media during this period included oils, acrylics, pastel, pencil, printmaking, photography, videography, and collage. She wrote, produced, and directed a video on the Caribbean’s lost native culture – Visions of the Arawaks.

Since 1994, she lives and works in Boulder Creek, California at her multimedia art studios. In 2011 Penny released an on-line version of the project she has been working on for many years, the 64 Dakini Oracle, an evolution of the Secret Dakini Oracle.