An Intimate Tour of Breasts
#1 LONDON
Walking Women
“I have just delivered An Intimate Tour of Breasts as part of the Walking Women festival. A guided tour through central London, taking in Tintoretto’s Birth of Venus (the most lactating painting the education officer could think of) at the National Gallery, via the Nell Gwynn pub (where we stopped for oranges), pausing by Soho’s lap dancing clubs, passing all the ubiquitous bare-breasted statuary en route, and unravelling how the mythologising and commodification of breasts through history impacts on the way we feel about our own breasts. As a strategy for addressing our visual literacy around representations of breasts, this was extremely effective, with participants volunteering intimate testimony of their own. I’m really excited about this as a model for future work. Walking and talking and responding to art, with prompts providing opportunities to interact, shifts the focus onto the participant’s response. It is a way of making art that has a solid history within feminist art practice that I can riff on – and one that could engage with an audience from both sides of the healthcare experience, opening up a dialogue that I believe is critical and timely." (from Say What You See engage 38: Visual Literacy, 2016)
#2 Birmingham
Birmingham was the second Intimate Tour. Originally commissioned for Still Walking Festival, it returned as part of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s programme, first in 2017, then in 2019 as part of ‘Women, Power, Protest’.
#3 Peterborough
