WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

In Private Eye, a few issues back, Pseud’s Corner featured the Turner Prize winning artist, Charlotte Prodger, as follows:

“I walk a lot,” she says. “You’ve got to piss. I piss outside a lot. I like it. Since I made the film, a lot of women have told me they like pissing outdoors. I always like thinking about my body in relationship to landscape in that way. I had been filming it for a while. Me and Cassie [Charlotte’s girlfriend] would be walking together and I’d say, ‘I’m going for a piss,’ and then I’d say, ‘Oh can you film it?’”  

I'm not sure there's anything exactly pseudish about that.  Prodger’s art, she says, deals with queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time, and evidently involves a fair amount of walking.

When I think of female artists, walking and pissing, my mind immediately goes to Helen Chadwick, whom I first discovered in Ambit magazine – she was the cover girl for issue number 81.

But later she became famous and in certain quarters notorious for a series of sculptures called Piss Flowers, made in 1991/2.

Chadwick and her boyfriend David Notarius were on a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, in February 1991.  They went out walking,made mounds of snow and “took turns” pissing into the snow.  It melted of course creating a cavity into which they poured plaster. The whole thing was then cast in bronze and painted white.  The end result looks like this:

Chadwick described the flowers as a "metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily".  

As I get older and as my bladder gets weaker, I find that I express myself bodily more and more often, though as yet I haven’t found a way of turning it into art.