Mouths froth and hands grab in Lydia Pettit and Olivia Sterling’s Bitches in Heat, a raucous, untamed exploration of desire on the margins. Pettit, inspired by Paula Rego’s iconic dog women, crawls across the floor in one sweeping canvas, with sharp, talon-like nails and bared teeth. Sterling depicts a pair of legs playfully dangling through the ceiling above directions for the ladies’ room, as a hand passes a retro cocktail from the corner of the canvas. Their appetites, symbolised through Sterling’s use of food and Pettit’s feral self-portraits, are at times unapologetically animalistic, challenging the limited contemporary cliches of who is desired – and how. Inspirations verge from the ominous shadows of ‘The Evil Dead’ to the bawdy humour of Beryl Cook and Otto Dix’s muscular, feline reclining woman.
Together, the works portray the nature of libido as it exists within and for the self. It is a pure expression of individual wants and appetites, free from the projected desire of others or the pressure to live into them. These works vividly convey the id, the unconscious part of the mind described by Freud as “chaos, a cauldron full of somatic influences”. Within this, unbridled drives run rampant, untampered by the moral judgements and shame of the ego and surrounding world. This sits in stark contrast with the female experience, which is severely judged and shamed by external voices, and violently guilted out of natural desires.
Pettit and Sterling depict drives as variously impish, menacing, and carnal. As red eyes glisten through the shadows and hands reach mischievously into boxes of chocolates, both artists share the parts of ourselves that become locked away, as they claw to find a way out. These are the drives that become othered and rejected, pushed down in response to trauma or stigmas in the external world which make even our own desires feel wrong or misplaced. For Bitches in Heat, both artists invite their ids out to play. In the words of Paula Rego, “to be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it. In these pictures every woman’s a dog woman, not downtrodden but powerful.” —Emily Steer
https://gutsgallery.co.uk/