Heaven Can Wait

Josephine Bacon’s work investigates the duality of constraint and eroticism in which female underwear becomes emblems of  sexuality or domination.

Her latest work looks at notions of sex and pornography, including popular bondage imagery of women and archive objects of female oppression. The undergarment has mutated into a device at once  erotic and repressive, at times flaunted in glamour-model pose but more  often as a lone object both sinister and sexual.

These paintings of chastity belts and the accompanying works on paper are concerned, not only with themes of sexuality and possession, but with mortality and desolation. The source of the subject matter is museum and medical collection archives – a record of brutality preserved in museum vaults – a testimony to condemnation caged in a sepulchre.

The tension and conflict between the barbarity of the original concept and the eroticism of popular restraint fetishes is sustained and reiterated by the materiality of the painted surface. The colour is at times a citrus stain – at others a flood of arterial red or torrent of Prussian-tinged black. The surface is always present as is the act of painting. These are physical in their execution and embrace – the works on paper possessing an immediacy born out of  a search for an authentic expression.

Josephine Bacon studied art at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade and  currently lives in Hackney.

The exhibition is showing at Pages of Hackney, Clapton until Thursday 31 March.

Heaven Can Wait
Pages of Hackney
70 Lower Clapton Road
Hackney E5 0RN
020 8525 1452