Their colours are bodily, not quite skin but entrail-like, blushed and faintly veined. Hard and stable as sculptures should be, they recall the forms of Moore, Hepworth and Brâncuși, yet their slick surfaces evoke the slimy wetness of something fresh and alive. Their ambiguity suggests a merging of interior and exterior, a turning the body inside out. And they achieve the near-impossible duality of being both disgusting and desirable.

There is violence in the work. Metal rods pierce the sculptures, entering them in unsettling gestures. One sculpture sits isolated on top of an oversized block of soap. Another creeps around a corner at the foot of a plinth. They appear lost and abandoned, as if needing to be cared for, cradled and made safe. They expose the vulnerability that exists in all of us, reached only by revealing what is inside.

What does it mean to walk a line between desire and disgust? Is this dichotomy disproportionately placed on women? As Lauren Elkin notes in Art Monsters, since antiquity female bodies have provoked anxiety about the crossing of boundaries, both physical and moral. She recalls Hesiod’s Theogony, where woman is described as a “beautiful evil” (kalon kakon) invented by Zeus to punish humanity, and how, a few centuries later, Greek playwright Menander wrote, “There are many monsters on the earth and in the sea, but the greatest is still a woman.” Reflecting on this legacy, Elkin writes: “Monsters dwell at borders; you might even say the border creates the monster. Everything that is acceptable over here; everything that is not over there. But these lines have never been fixed.” These objects, these ‘monsters’ inhabit that unstable borderland where beauty and revulsion, inside and outside co-exist.

The objects sit among tiled columns that rise at varying heights. A play on the gallery plinth, yes, but also a reference to the tiles that surround us in the privacy of our bathrooms — tiles that can be wiped clean, disinfected from our daily leakages. The tiles are stark white and glossy, clean and sterile, forming the perfect environment for the slick-looking objects to inhabit. As visitors move through the room, passing each plinth, the view switches from bathroom back to gallery, from private to public.

The bathroom is a place to be naked, to wash ourselves with soap, to defecate, to bleed, sometimes to vomit. When we make ourselves clean, we pay particular attention to our openings — genitals, anus, mouth. We remove what is smelly and unwanted. We remove any evidence of the filth that exists inside us. The daily ritual of policing the edges of the body helps to keep our insides unseen and unknown. As Julia Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror, abjection “is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules”. These fluids and excretions, she notes, “show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live”. The sight or smell of bodily fluids is a reminder of our fragile boundaries.

In addition to washing, bathrooms are for beautifying: applying makeup, straightening hair, making oneself more pleasing to the world on the other side of the door. There is a mirror, but not a completely clear one. At the centre of the metal plane a reflection can be seen, as if someone has wiped away the steam, but it quickly feathers out into haze. Its brightest and most reflective area suggests an opening or portal. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud described how infants first encounter the world through their erotogenic zones, which become central to their development and to their understanding of themselves and others: the mouth as the first interface (ages 0–1), the anus as a site of control and learning (1–3), and the genitals signal the onset of emerging identity differences (3–6). This mirror, fogged then seemingly cleared, echoes those early gateways and shows how, and from where, our sense of self begins to take shape. 

Beside the mirror hangs a peculiar object, unlike anything else in the room. An undulating ring is covered with small scales that wrap around its form. At first the pattern evokes something natural, but closer inspection reveals that the scales are thousands of overlapping artificial fingernails, bright white and plasticky, flowing into one another like a wave. Natural nail clippings are deemed abject, discarded and unwanted, yet these manufactured nails present themselves as fresh and new. Some say the shape recalls a swan eating itself, an ouroboros of swans. By consuming itself, the ouroboros symbolises a unity of opposites – inside and outside, creation and annihilation, beginning and end.

There is another oversized block of soap in the room. Golden and translucent, it resembles the serous fluid beneath a healing scab. Fine needles — the kind used in acupuncture, a traditional Chinese medicine practice — pierce its surface. Acting as a stand-in for the body, the soap’s translucency evokes the hidden world beneath our skin, a world vulnerable to pain and in need of care. As the penetrating needles suggest, healing is possible when we allow the outside world to enter. The soap is supported by another plinth but this one is only partially covered in tiles. Its raw layers of adhesive and mesh have been revealed and its insides are no longer secret.

This impulse to cleanse, contain and disguise the body echoes a long tradition in European thought of separating mind from matter. René Descartes, writing in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), proposed two kinds of substance. Res cogitans, the thinking substance, is the mind or soul: immaterial, indivisible, the seat of thought and will. Res extensa, the extended substance, is the body: material, divisible, mechanistic, a kind of machine governed by physical laws. By drawing this line, Descartes elevated thought while demoting the body and its parts to the status of hardware. The objects push against this idea. By turning the body inside out they reveal how inseparable thought and flesh really are.

We like to think of ourselves as resilient and impermeable. That is what we want others to believe. But our orifices, our private parts, connect our soft and vulnerable insides to the outside world. Sometimes these openings give us pleasure, sometimes pain, even disease. By turning the body inside out, WASH OVER ME brings the body’s secret substances into the gallery, revealing how porous the boundaries between clean and dirty, beauty and ugliness, healing and pain, thought and flesh really are. Rather than a sealed division between self and world, WASH OVER ME presents a space where shame and desire coexist and where what leaks out cannot be contained.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Descartes, René. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.

Elkin, Lauren. Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, 123–246. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Schneider, Anna, ed. Blind Faith: Between the Visceral and the Cognitive in Contemporary Art. Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2018.

Smith, Jane. The Bathroom In (and As) Art. Sydney: NAS Press, 2024.