All dressed up with nowhere to go (2012)
In 1960, Hester’s father, Stephen Jones, then a 16 year-old art student at Hornsey School of Art, snuck into Smithfield Meat Market to photograph the meat, and men at work. 50 years later, with the same Rolleicord camera, she has photographed the meat market today, drawing upon the women in clubs, bars and lap dancing venues surrounding the market. Inviting girls and women of varied ages into her studio, far from the clubs and bars, to perform for the imagined male gaze. The works invite the viewer to reconsider the dominant patriarchal gaze and “women’s own participation in their subordination and the construction of a feminine psychology.” - Orbach
The work draws upon CJ Adam's theory of the animal and woman as "absent referent" in The Sexual Politics of Meat, the objectification and control of women and animals as consumables and commodities, in relation to the patriarchal politics that dominate our culture, “These issues are “in our face” all the time. We do not perceive them as problematic because we are so used to having our dominant culture mirror these attitudes. We become shaped by and participants in the structure of the absent referent [...} Animals are consumed literally and women are consumed visually and through sexual access to our bodies the same process of objectification and fragmentation is at work. But advertisements make this process appear innocent. No one seems harmed. The double entendres, the puns, the visual substitutions – they are humour(ed?) by the dominant culture about women and the other animals who are made consumable, made into objects.”
The work draws upon CJ Adam's theory of the animal and woman as "absent referent" in The Sexual Politics of Meat, the objectification and control of women and animals as consumables and commodities, in relation to the patriarchal politics that dominate our culture, “These issues are “in our face” all the time. We do not perceive them as problematic because we are so used to having our dominant culture mirror these attitudes. We become shaped by and participants in the structure of the absent referent [...} Animals are consumed literally and women are consumed visually and through sexual access to our bodies the same process of objectification and fragmentation is at work. But advertisements make this process appear innocent. No one seems harmed. The double entendres, the puns, the visual substitutions – they are humour(ed?) by the dominant culture about women and the other animals who are made consumable, made into objects.”
