 Welcome to this evening's event. We're going to start very shortly. We're just going to give people a few moments to log on. So make yourself comfortable and we'll introduce the event very soon. Welcome to those of you who are joining us. We're going to start the event very shortly. We can see the numbers climbing up all the time as people log on and make themselves comfortable. So we'll begin very shortly. Well, good evening, everyone. My name is Sarah Turner. I'm the Deputy Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, which is part of Yale University and based in Bedford Square in Central London. We're really delighted to be collaborating with the Photographers Gallery on a landmark conference, which is taking place over three days. And that's called Concerning Photography, the Photographers Gallery and Photographic Networks in Britain circa 1971 to the present. And this is day two of the event. And thank you to the audience members who are logging in from all over the world to hear tonight's keynote talk, as well as conference papers and panel discussions throughout the three days. We've also asked artists to give keynote presentations during the conference. And tonight we have an artist who is someone who has exploded, expanded and redefined definitions of photography and photographic practices. A pathbreaking cosmos exploding artist, and that is the artist Penny Slinger. So I'm really delighted to welcome Penny and Penny will be in conversation with the curator Laura Smith. I'm going to introduce them and give you a bit more biographical information, but before I do, I just want you to walk you through the housekeeping slide that we have. And the session will consist of Penny's talk, and that will last for around 30 minutes, and then there will be a chair discussion and Q&A with Laura Smith. We really welcome audience members' engagement and we want you to feel involved in these events and ask questions, and you can do that by typing your question in the Q&A box. You can also use the chat function during the talk if you need to communicate to the team or if you want to express any ideas, please use that. The session is being recorded and will be made available to the public. If you would like to use a closed captioning function, you can find that by pressing the CC button at the bottom right hand corner of your screen. So now let me tell you a little bit more about our speakers this evening. Penny Slinger is a British born Los Angeles based artist who has been exploring feminism, eroticism and mysticism in her art for over 50 years. Slinger found surrealism in the 1960s and 70s using it to plumb the depths of the feminine psyche. She created three books of photographic collage. 50% of the visible woman in 1971, an exorcism in 1977, and mountain ecstasy in 1979. She co-authored the best-selling book, Sexual Secrets, the Alchemy of Ecstasy in 1979. She continues to work in many mediums including collage, photography, drawing, sculpture and assemblage, performance arts, film and video, and her work is shown internationally in museum collections. She's the subject of an absolutely amazing documentary I recommend it to you all called Penny Slinger, Out of the Shadows, which was made available in 2017. In 2019 she collaborated with Maria Grazia Curie to create the set design for Dior's autumn winter collection of 2019-20. And she's represented by Blum and Poe in Los Angeles and Richard Salton in London. And Penny, as I say after her talk, will be in conversation with the curator, Laura Smith, who works at the Whitechapel Gallery. Many of you will have visited, I'm sure, her recent exhibition, the absolutely incredible Eileen Agar Angel of Anarchy, which took place last year. And she's previously produced exhibitions with Sol Calero, Helen Camuck and Anna Maria Molino. Prior to the Whitechapel, Laura was curator at Tate, where she created exhibitions, many of which again were absolutely groundbreaking, including ones with Rebecca Warren in 2017, Lillianne Lyn in 2015, Lucy Stein in 2015, and the artist Linda in 2013, just to name a few, as well as a group show Virginia Woolf, an exhibition inspired by her writings in 2018. Laura writes extensively on modern and contemporary art, and she's recently contributed to Oxford University's Press, Virginia Woolf's reader, as well as monographs on Lisa Brice and Pierre Arc. So I know we're in for an incredible treat this evening as we hear from Penny and let the discussion unfold afterwards and have your questions in response to that as well. So without further ado, I'm going to welcome Penny Slinger to speak to us this evening. Welcome Penny and thank you so much for joining us from Los Angeles. OK, so I called my show here photography and collage in the art of performance because I wanted to really connect the dots between how photography has played such an important role in all the art in all the different media that I've created. So it's kind of homage to the role of photography in my art. And coincidentally, I have a 50 year anniversary myself, as well as a photographer's gallery. And here is the frontispiece of the ever bandit myself, still wanted, I guess, and it was the first image in 50% of visible woman. And this was my first book of collage and poems. And as you can see, I had a number of collages and then the poetry on the other side. And in the book, the poetry is overlaid over the images. And here we are. This is I made for my thesis presentation in 1969 when I was leaving Chelsea College of Art. I made three dummy copies of the book and I bound them in snakeskin. And this is what they look like. And in 1971, I was able to go on and publish it. And that is the book that we are celebrating the anniversary of its publication. I use the combination of different things in here, my images of myself that were taken for me or me, images of my girlfriends or other things that I wanted to take. And then isn't this one straight from different media that I freely used and incorporated in. Here is my girlfriend Sue, who was a muse of mine at the time. And here is how the poetry and the images looked in the handbound copy. I use Japanese paper and type the words over onto the paper and then they overlaid the image. And in this way, I thought that I could make a very definite statement about the connection of words and images. And the whole thing was inspired by my discovery of the collage books of Max Ernst when I was preparing for my thesis. And not to them, I didn't really realise collage would be seamless and magical and create new words. And when I saw his books in Simone de Bonte, Lafansante, I was absolutely intrigued and fascinated. And this was the inspiration for my book. And I went to meet Max Ernst in Paris before delivering my thesis. So Roland Penrose was my key into this world at the time, took me to meet him, and he signed a book to me. And I made a film at the same time that I handed in my written thesis, I made a film, and I made my first book. So these are skills from the film. And in that I used images from the books and then incorporated it with footage that I shot of animals and source material, so that I created a montage of these different elements to be a homage to him. I felt that being inspired by someone, the best way that you can express your gratitude it is to create something yourself with that inspiration. So here we see some of the surreal beings, magical, mythical beings that he was creating in his collages. And then here are pages from 50% for visible woman, the colour is the original collage and then how it translated in black and white in the book. And so you can see I'm trying to use photography instead of the old engravings he used to be what for me was still very fresh. There wasn't really much photographic collage around at the time. So I thought that it was a fresh way of treating the material. I was also very interested in photography. This is a page from my sketchbook at Chelsea, and I adored my bridge and watching his series of figures and the interactions of figures. I made many drawings from these and these studies and then another little film that I made along with the tribute to Maxence was one called Rhythm of Two Figures, where I use photography as well as film, and I use sequences of animated stills and these are some of the stills where again you can see the influence of my bridge as I was trying to connect with movement like I'm descending a staircase with another inspiration and showing that through double, triple, quadruple exposures in the camera, which is the only way I could do that at that time. And then these are other stills that I took. So at the time was working with a set up of mirrors. These little triangles you can see are actually a group of triangular mirrors stuck onto a cloth, which I could manipulate and change the angles, one in relation to each other. I also photograph myself and my model using this. It is a page from the sketchbook showing how from the photographic originals, I then developed into different kind of montages using different materials so here is one of these uses. This is a live cast of my face in there. There's a mirror box receding in one section. There are mirrors raised on another. There's printed elements and then there are sculptural forms that are covered in actual stockings. So that was one way that I was interpreting this mirror series. And these are more straightforward, a gouache and a drawing of the same series and material, and then two paintings, oil paintings, one on a wood panel, and then I had square mirrors as well. And I was trying at the time to get out of the idea of the archetype of the new live model and put my model in stockings and tried to make her more sensual and more like a woman than just a model. And in my animated short films that I made, I made one showing the mirror system at work and this was part of that as well. And you can see from my sketchbook pages here, I was very influenced by film. Film was, in a way, as important if not more than some of the other plastic arts. And so we have stills here from Perestrova, which was an underground film which I was very influenced by at the time and then just compact sheets of myself under water and the trails of my head put next to each other because I was seeing everything really in these sequences of images. Eyes without a face, a face of another. All these were influential films and then you see I have bacon in here because I was very interested in the persona, the way that we actually present ourselves and the manability of that and the mass and how we wear mass. And this was a piece that I did, which is printed on a transparent, not completely transparent, translucent, plexi, and it's prints, silk screen prints of my face on both sides. And these prints I also used in my series of head boxes, which I began while at Chelsea, and they consist of lifecasts of my face, and then with different things put in relation to them, and often photographic images so that you can see I have a transparent layer, a few inches away from the lifecast at the back with what was encoded with a transparent photographic material without sandwich between two pieces of glass and put in relation to the face behind. So again you see the photographic part interacting. And these are images from 50% of a visible woman, where you see here's my myself in all those different guises as we've seen printed on the plexi and now we produce in the book, trying to kind of smidge and transform that image so, and the one on the right is how much can agree also from the book. And here, another couple of this one on the right is what I couldn't make up my mind. And so looking at this is the face pack but just suppose with images from Vietnam. So all of that was in this 1971 book. And in the book I didn't use the Japanese paper anymore, I used a transparent kind of tracing paper to print all the poetry on, but the same root idea was able to be expressed. And here you have one of my models painted white. And in another of the short films that I made while Chelsea in the top left, you can see her painted white in the film, and then myself with masks. So all of these themes were flowing backwards and forwards across the media. On the left, you see my mummy case that I made. I was very fond of Egyptian mythology and consciousness and wanted to make my own sarcophagus. So this is a big sarcophagus that I made while at Chelsea in metal and fiberglass, and then I photographed it. And these two images on the right are images from 50% physical women. So you can see again the cross-platforming of objects and photographic colours where I incorporate them across the book. Here again is my muse, Susanka, as I took a series of photographs of her in the bar. And then on the right where I used one of them in 50% physical women. And this is from a contact strip of myself, but my boyfriend at the time, Ray, photographed for me, and I used lots of those photographs in 50% physical women. And the one that I original collage on the right, and as it appears on the book in the left. And here you see where I have just gone to any source that I like. These are not photographs I took, but found object rubé that I then transformed and shifted to tell the story that I wanted to tell. This is the first aid, and this one is the last image in the book that shows about this, and a giant. Here is the latest version of the clock, one that's come out this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary, much as the photographer's gallery is celebrating. You can see I tried to incorporate the elements of the first edition that I made by hand, and then the printed one in this compilation. And I'm very pleased because Linda, who you mentioned earlier, and I have a conversation, which is included at the back of the book, which brings it all from then to now in a very right away, I think. And so, at this time, I went on to work with the themes of food and eroticism, and of presenting myself as the table spread, so to speak, and I explored this in many different ways in my exhibition, second solo exhibition at Angela Flowers Gallery called Opening. And this was done in the form of a menu, and it was a series of tabletops and mousepieces, and also included the series of myself as a wedding cake. And on this theme of performance art, here you can see some of the pictures that we took. I made and designed this wearable wedding cake, and then got into it and got my friend's photographer, you and I, to photograph me. And these then formed the basis of the series that some were within a compass, my girlfriend Celia, some of my own, and some were followed into. And then I made a bride's book, parodying really the bride's book we're familiar with with scrapbooks, and making it with my own imagery here. I also did a series of mousepieces, and this was on the theme of connecting with this oral energy that I was looking at through the whole exhibition, but also saying, you know, as women, we haven't had mouthpieces, and I want to be a mouthpiece. So, here are the source mouths that I use, and then they translated into series of two dimensional photographs. Open and shut case, this one is called. Here what I say, read my lips. I made at the same time a series of live casts, and, although these are not photographic. I've always in a way considered that live casting is like the three dimensional equivalent of photography, something more complicated to achieve, but I really like to bridge the worlds between these dimensions. And so I did a series of mouthpieces that were wax live cast in fact I even worked with some of the people from London to source to realize these wax live cuts. And this one's called capital pain. I just tried to do a lot of different things, and I also work at the same time with zero machine. At that time, the copying machines have just really come into being. I didn't really know anyone else using them at that point for art. So, much as a photograph I use these to create one of the sort myself directly on the machine. And the one on the left is particularly interesting because I used a machine when I was teaching at Portsmouth Art School because they had a machine there, and I used to go and lunchtime and put myself on the machine and play my prints. The machine that you could vary the speed the paper went through and so I put a long date in this book. And then here's one with roses straight up directly on to the paper machine. And then we'll look at an exorcism which was the next from our book which I did. And this was involved with my relationship with Peter Whitehead, the filmmaker, and also my relationship with Dana Arden and the women's theater group. And all of these experiences are really being processed along with the rest of my life in this work called an exorcism. And I took a stately home in Northamptonshire called Lillford Hall, and it was somewhat Peter's theme when he was in Sadat when he was a student and we went back and found it and got permission to shoot there. I took a series of stills, we made some video, but these stills then became the basis for the book. And as you see this image for self image shows how I identified myself, my being with the being of the house. And then exploring all the different rooms and asking why if a man got the key and why is there a brick wall behind this door into my innocent. I want to find out. We see there's a picture of the house and then it hears me talking to myself. I'm trying to go back to my childhood back into my rooms to probe and discover what has brought me to the place I am today. What are my fears? What are the things that, you know, are preventing me from really being my food self. Here you see a source image on the left and then the collage, which was a montage. In this case, I put the film into two films into the enlarger and made the montage in the dark room and then added other collage elements afterwards. Here my experience in the conference floor crystallized into this section. Here again a rose garden section. You can see the empty side of the house and then populated by, in this case images of myself and this career did life cast culture that I made by Chelsea. Here we have petals plus and also from the rose garden and on the left you see the source image. This was shot by Peter of me and this happens to be in the desert in Iran. Then I did a series of myself as the bride again and that comes into this image, Wentlock. With Sue, who we've met before, she is here as the other woman or my older ego as we work through this whole drama itself. At the same time, we shot this film low for the fall in 69 when we were at the building and these are still some of that film and it remains uncut just sort of as it is that it came out of the camera because it's rather interesting in that style. And there's Peter and myself and the other characters who played in this drama, the birds, Peter pickup folk me. And so there's a direct connection with these creatures that is explored in this work as well. So there's myself playing, there's Peter playing, there's Sue playing and also the creatures and occasionally other groups of people as in this one called tribunal, which was a found photograph and I slipped Peter's image in there on the right. And these, again, Peter, Sue, myself. And we acted out in this idea of using photography as a tool to show performance here. So we're acting out this drama of competition, modern connection. Here I'm acting out the synambulus here, death grip, hang up this one's board and this one I'm doing kind of role reversal. It's in the book, and it was also very much part of my whole manifestation and experience with the woman's theatre group Holocaust which Jane Arden directed and which myself, Sue and a number of other women participated in it was the first woman theatre group. And this was part of my journey to wish to both collaborate with others and not just be an egoic artist, spent on my own personal success, but to be able to communicate with others and create together and especially with other women because I feel that's what we've been missing in society so long. It went on to become the film The Other Side of the Underneath, which I also appeared and art directed, but it is a very heavy kind of film and not very redemptive. And for me, it was important to have that redemption and this is one of the last images of an exorcist where I'm emerging in the house owning it, like owning myself with all its aspects and the film The Richard Cove which made anything out of the Shannon's books in depth about the creation of this long with a lot of my other early work. So we're able to see the roots of how that came across. The next phase in my art and life is when I discovered Cantra and that came through seeing a shirt Hayward Gallery in the early 70s and then later finding someone who became my partner who I explored in this film. He's in here and there and the one man that's in there, but here it's me using that same technique of copying machine art monographs, but now turning them into these versions of the Chakra men and women, which I've seen in Cantra that aren't so impressed. Your body is your temple and I wanted to show that. And I also made all the drawings for sexual secrets over 600 drawings that photography played a major role in that too. As you can see, here's me on the left posing of Tali and then the image of Tali in there. And so there were a lot of photographs of myself and Nick that were made into drawings for the book. And Mountain Ecstasy was the next book that came along and I'm going to cover this rather quickly because this one was mainly found images. I was trying to take different approaches in each of my collage books. The Exorcism was mainly my own photographic material, material specifically created for that. This was mainly found material. And there I was celebrating my discovery of Cantra and the multidimensional weave of the spiritual material that I found embedded in embracing this. And it was a really nice thing for me. And his book Mountain Ecstasy is a celebration and I created it trying to show Nick Douglas, my partner, the way to use collage and just enjoying the play and the process together. And here's Mark Tali, who is, you know, the great shock here of the Catholic progression, me giving a new twist to all of this. And I make a little appearance here in the face at the top, that's my face. And that was taken from photographic session that I did with Nick and his Nick on the left, where I was photographing the achiever. And here he's photographing the shock to me on the left. And these were a series done by my own madness of me as the Red Dacchini that we're done at that time too. And I created the secret. It was called the Pact of Dacchini Orofo now, but originally the secret Dacchini Orofo, which came out just before sexual secrets. Well, just after sexual secrets and before Mountain Ecstasy, but all of them happened pretty much at the same time after I came together with Nick Douglas and we pulled our knowledge and energy and creativity come up with this Orofo Dacchini Orofo as well. And divination is such a wonderful tool for all of us to self-acturise. So that's me doing the divination. And then we move on to, this is now in the early 2000s, where I did another version of the Orofo called the 64 Dacchini Orofo, where I fully embodied myself and my 60 other women embodied the energies of all the Dacchinis. And I make the photographic collages to go with them so you can see my photoshoot on the left and embodiment in the image. And here, Carly, where I came embodying Carly, the use in this Orofo system, and here where I am embodying ISIS. And here, Alchemaca, I think of the artist as the Alchemist, and here I got a chance to put myself in that position. And here, this is the first image, air number one, and you see I body painted and adorned and photographed the beautiful women to embody these energies of the 64 Dacchinis. And this is earth, so we come with a solid number 64, just to give you a taste of that, because that was very much important part of embodiment and using photography to express that embodiment and how large to take it into a realm of mythic. And then we come now to the more recent series, which I did during the pandemic with my body in a box. And here, I wanted to really express and show what was happening, not only to myself, but what I thought was happening collectively. And I generally don't particularly feel the need to express things that are current and political, but in the case of the pandemic, this was such an extraordinary global event and a time for everybody to take a time out and both self reflect and reflect about the culture in the society and everything that we take for granted. I thought it was very important to comment in real time. So I made a series of what are 54 photo collages, now using the tools, which I used also for the Dacchinis of digital collage working in the computer, rather than working with cut and paste. And this was something I came to the beginning of the 90s. I saw a Photoshop and realized I had to be able to own this new set of tools to make collage because it just opened up so many more possibilities and gave us so much more control over so many factors. So I have been working in the main in digital collage in the last years. And so the idea was to present these images, my body in a box and the box, the actual image of the box is taken from a series which I have also been working on in the last few years of three dimensional pieces using life pass and objects. And that is for the alchemy of stuff, that particular section of work on my body, but using myself as my news now in order to try and express a relevancy to try and remedy what I believe is kind of this next level of feminism, which is the ages. And the fact that, you know, when we are older, generally we are marginalized and seen as not essential to society, and yet I think in our wisdom years we are the most essential and we have this body of experience. I'm working on this whole series called my body, which is about my body of experience. And this particular sector, I put the boxes that I physically made, and then use those as collage elements to put all these photographs that I have my partner, and the grand take of me to express that kind of semaphore of being, I have an understanding of how we embrace things, whether we shy away, or whether we open up, really dictates a lot of how we are able to cope with them and what kind of impact they have on us. So I wanted to show myself in all of that dynamic and duality, and to express that. And I wrote 40 poems and 54 collages, some of the first figures of these collages, and started with this one called our hoarding, which is what we were all suddenly doing, we were collecting all these things around us to try and take care of ourselves during this time. And then protection, trying to look at all of that, our feeling in this closed off, covering my heart and my lungs, and trying to get all those things that we needed to keep safe during this time. And this one is called the brick wall. And as you can see, I'm back in my brick wall again, and feeling once we were confined in these boxes that we were ripped in. And this talks about in the poem, you know, the power of the imagination really to break through that brick wall and go through to that limitless mind sky on the other side. This one was to do, you know, those nightmares and reflecting those things which were coming up for me, and which I did in my little bit of research of reaching out for other people find that it was common for everyone to be having these kind of fears, because suddenly there was mortality facing us. And we'd always known it was there, but suddenly it was right in everybody's lap. And so we had to look at it. And then this one is metamorphosis. And it's again, looking at the way we can transform and emerge out of this suffocating cocoon. This one is my dollhouse, and I'm taking the theme of the dollhouse, which I explored often in my work, and bringing it to bear is that I am all my little dolls or my little selves. And here's suffocating on the left, and then the one on the right is clothed in the sun. And this was to do with the sun meditation I was doing, which was helping me find that energy and that light in that darkness and relief from that kind of suffocation. So I wanted to share those things. And this one is kind of metamorphosis, rose garden, all of that. And these are called boxes getting smaller. It was when I think we went into the second round of the pandemic thinking that it was time to come out. And then we got girls back in, and I was trying to express really how it seemed everyone was feeling at this time that students have ordered that. And then this one, which was my female version of the Saint Sebastian image, Saint Sebastian, which I had always admired and coupling that with the idea of shooting the arrow or apple off the head. And just the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune that we were all experiencing. And these are views shot from my window, where I lived down an LA of the protests that were happening for Black Lives Matters and everything that was going on all around me. And I just saw myself there in my room, but resonating with and taking the need to pray for the resolution of all these things. And then the longing for water, which I was finding was one thing I was feeling while I was in my room that I would love to be able to get into the water again. So I have an affiliate image on the right, but on the left, this one's called Cogma. And again, trying to express that feeling that we all had of sinking into something that we didn't know how we were going to find out about. And then these are one of the final images when, apart from all that we were experiencing through the trials of the pandemic, there were all these horrible fires which were devastating, everything. And so it was a feeling like, you know, my house is on fire and we're going to run and we're going to hide. And then these are from the other series, which I have been working on in 2016, 2017, but I haven't shown them yet. So within the greater series of my body, these are animal totems, where I took various animals that I, other creatures that I photographed and blended them with my body as a tribute to the natural world and to all these creatures which we have been treating really as if they don't have the feelings and the sentience. And so, in marrying myself with them, I was trying to give their presence and their personality and their right of life a place in the pantheon and also in the study of the New Guinea and Dakhini and goddess forms. Many have the animal and bird heads, so this was represented something that was weaving all of this that has always been part of my passion and love together and thinking again of the bird-headed beings of vaccines that are still alive and well and well today. So I've really come to the end of my slides. I can't speak longer and I was trying to move fast and I don't know how long, what the time is now to know how long I've been talking and whether we want to just move into doing Q&A or whether we'd like to go back and go more in depth into something. Thanks Penny. I think maybe we can start the Q&A and hopefully some things will get teased out as we talk through some of my questions and hopefully some audience questions. But first I just wanted to say thank you for that amazing presentation and thank you also for such a remarkable and vital career that, as Sarah said, expanded and exploded photographic practice but also charted a very particular and pioneering feminism that was very important and that you haven't wavered from for over 50 years. So thank you. The first question I wanted to ask kind of goes back to the context that you are working in and I'm interested in the fact that you are making the works in the 70s that you started your presentation with in what was quite a socially conservative context. And I wondered if you could tell us how, whether you felt that conservatism and if so what strategies did you develop to allow you to keep making what you were making which was well as far as I understand fairly radical, even in terms of feminist practice. Yes, it was conservative and I felt, along with the conservatism, there was a kind of greyness, you know, everything felt rather mediocre and dull to me. And I felt a lot of that seemed to be because we as women weren't really in a position to express ourselves fully. And I just sense that there was so much more potential. And to talk about feminism and I have claimed feminism for myself over recent years as feminism seems to have broadened its base and be more inclusive of so many things. But at that time, the kind of feminist movement that was happening seems to be mainly focused and I went to a few meetings and I was interested to see what was happening. I was really focused on getting the same kind of rights as men, having this rather kind of militant approach that is important to have those things that I felt that my piece was a little bit different because I wanted to really bring the qualities of a woman to be not just given equal place, although that would be fine, but really recognised for the power and grace that they have. And so, therefore, I felt that the whole being, the inner world, the dreams, the sensuality, the sexuality, all these things were ours to claim. And so, for me, it was actually exciting, because I thought I had something to kind of butt up against because it wasn't there, but I thought it could be. And so there was an optimism in everything I did and when I was trying to shock people into a recognition with my images, I wanted to jangle them up a bit, because I wanted to shape things up, but not so that it would then just be in disarray, so that something beautiful and much more juicy and tangible could emerge out of it. And that was, I thought, the feminine spirit which has been suppressed. And how was 50% of the visible woman received? I know that Mountain Ecstasy had some controversy around it, right? Yes. But what was the reception to the other two photo collage books? How did they come across? Well, you know, it goes across the board. I had some wonderful reviews. I mean, Rolling Stones said that it could be as popular, that book could be as popular on your bookshelf as Sergeant Pepper on your record album collection. I wish. And I met Lawrence Burrell, the writer, and he told me that your subconscious is in a rare state of cheesy entropy. Don't ever get psychoanalyzed. Keep it that way. So those are the kind of reactions I got. Yes, Mountain Ecstasy, of course, was more controversial because the customs seized it as it printed it in the Netherlands and coming over into England, British customs seized it and they ended up burning lots of copies of it at pornography, which I just said, you know, good job it wasn't me but this time. And obviously they can't tell pornography from the alchemised version of, you know, because I did use a lot of erotica, found erotica in that book, but I did something with it and that's something they didn't seem to recognise. Interesting that the original source material wasn't burnt. It probably slipped in. I don't know that. I thought they had private deals around it. I wanted to keep a semi with feminism. I wanted to talk about surrealism as a surrealism fan. But one of my biggest, I guess, questions or issues with it as a movement is its treatment of women, particularly women artists. So I wondered what your thoughts are on how using a surrealist framework as you did through Ernst, how that could support feminist intent, how could you kind of work within that parameter to turn it on itself? Well, what I recognised in surrealism was something which was a kind of a pantheistic view of things, something which allowed everything to join together with everything else. So not only did it for me meld and dissolve the barriers between male and female, it dissolved the barriers between woman and tree and fish and sky and machinery and anything you wanted. So it was a grand permission to go into the subconscious. And for me, as I was saying, I always feel that I've been most interested in the psyche and in the inner workings of the feminine rather than the official qualities or just the gender specific things, but those things which are inside us. So those are in us all. And I do believe that we're all male and female within and that these things dance together and you come out a certain way. But even the act of creation itself is the joining together for me of male and female elements within you. They make lovingly produces beautiful baby as a work of art. So, you know, I've always felt that and so the fluidity of surrealism for me was not gender specific at all, it went way beyond that. And the fact that, although there had been women's surrealist, I hadn't seen another woman really use it to specifically probe the feminine and probe the female psyche. And that's why I feel that this is fresh and new and something that I can use these tools but make something that hasn't been made before. It's interesting as well thinking about the subconscious in surrealism and something that I've read about in the way you talk about your work and Tantra, which is the super conscious. So maybe you could explain a little bit about what the super conscious is and how the super conscious and the sub conscious come together via Tantra, which I understand had such a huge impact on your career and life, but how those two philosophies come together in your work. Yes, that's a very interesting, significant point, because to me I thought with an exorcism and that was my college shows extended over seven years of working intensely on this and as it was my own kind of psych analysis and probing all those parts of myself, as well as I could with those tools. When I came out at the end of it feeling reborn, it's been a question well, well what's next. And to me, this, you know, emergence of the feminine. Yes, we need all those psychological tools that simple, but then there's something beyond that. Something beyond that was what I found and recognized in Tantra and in Tantra are, because when I saw a Tantra guard at the area with gallery, I felt like I'd come home I, I recognize the imagery and it was so familiar from surrealism. And yet it took it somewhere else and that's what I term the super conscious instead of the subconscious. So here we are as our little consciousness in the middle, but we are so much faster than that. We're faster below, and we're faster above. So for me is studying all these different forms of the divine feminine work, just like clues into looking at the potential of the human spirit, and that if one resonates with, and aspires to these kind of qualities that it's actually the next evolutionary step for us as human beings to claim up for the potential and also I thought it was really key and important in terms of the feminine coming into ascendancy, and not just for women but feminine and men as well, because as I say, I feel we all have both of these qualities in us. But as that feminine came up, if we didn't want it to be more of the old games, a more of the old power plays just with a different place now, because the guns are a guy. But no, we want this to be truly evolving and truly win-win all around. And that means that we need to claim and own those more elevated frequencies of the divine. The differences of our ability to reach to not just passion, but compassion, and not just competition, but complementary things, things that help and support each other, all of that I felt needed to really happen. I found this amazing, beautiful visual vocabulary, which was surreal and fantastic and not dry and didactic and nothing like all the old rhymes of religions which put dogma and certain kind of forces, again, of things to be. I found panther was this much bigger, bigger we, which it actually means to expand and to weave the word panther. So you have something where you could weave all these threads together and take this fantastic visual tapestry as well at the same time weaving the parts of yourself into this super-conscious being. So that's what struck me and which I then wanted to integrate into my life and work and hopefully have been doing so quite well now. I think so. I think that it definitely finds resonance in the last body of works that you showed us of your body collaged with the different animal species. I think that really speaks to me to what you were just saying about this kind of overarching compassion. We have a couple of questions from the audience that I will read out to you. The first says, I'm fascinated how the lines in your work, despite changing times and technology, it is so constantly wonderfully Penny slinger. How do you think the reception to your work has developed as public attitudes have changed in a way I guess based on your work and that of those who have followed on from you? Well, there is more reception now than there was, but then on the other hand, I was away really from the fine art world for a long time, so I hadn't stopped working. I've been continuing to produce art in one form or another my whole life, but I had left from England to actually welcome sexual secrets with the publisher who was in New York. So that took me away from England and then after that I moved to the Caribbean for 15 years and had a whole other career. That was mainly focused on honouring the indigenous people of the area and looking at what that meant to have a kind of connection with the natural world that we moved away from. So that was a very important time and then I came to California and for 20 years nearly worked with all the performers and artists in the visionary community. So that was another kind of life and only really since 2009 when I was in Angels of Anarchy and the Dark Monarch at Tate St Ives, those two exhibitions brought me back into connection with the fine art world again. And I really welcomed it then because I thought if I'm not in the middle of it, I can still be keeping my place and making my lineage. It's going to pass on, but I found kind of out of sighted out of mind and that I couldn't really do that on my own and I needed to be part of the art community to be able to show up. And as I've moved now into this time in my life where I feel it's so important that I show up as part of my practice because being older, I don't want to be made irrelevant and marginalised. I want to show up. Therefore, this coincides with me being back and trying to have as much of a platform as possible because as she expressed, I have worked in many different ways in many different media, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and how it always together is a story that I don't think that many people have. So that's kind of a treasure, and I'm hoping to be able to share as much of that as possible because that's what I care about and I don't want it just to happen optionally, which has been the fate of so many wonderful artists. On that note, a question that's just come in, I won't, I'll go back to the other ones, don't worry, but this one leads on what's your ideal venue for showing your work and what following on from that is your ideal audience. My ideal audience is anyone who has eyes, ears, heart, anyone who can recognise things and be open enough to be moved by them. That's my ideal audience because then you can do what an artist wants to do, which is touch people and inspire them. But my ideal venue, I would very much like to have the opportunity to do a kind of multi, multi room, big exposition of the whole passage of my work, showing all the different series, but together as one big body of work, so that hopefully that will trigger the ah-ha factor in people of things that look disparate. They can understand how it all comes together and creates like a matter of consciousness really, and I hope that it's a matter of awakening of the feminine, that's really what I've been working on on my life. Another question from the audience. In the age of the internet and the relatively easy sharing of images of data, is there still a power in the physical object for you? What was the thing about the power of the physical object? In the age of the internet, is there still a power in the physical object for you? Less than the power. Is there still a power? Is there still a power? Ah, definitely. Yes, there definitely is. You know, I wish I had all the physical objects that I've ever created, a lot of them have actually sort of disappeared, and that's another story, but the fact of making them, even this last body of three-dimensional work, which I did back in 2016, 2017, it hasn't been shown yet, and the alchemy of stuff, a lot of these pieces are eight foot by four foot, and they're life casts of myself with all these other objects. Now, for me, my age now, to actually physically make these things was quite monumental, and so a lot of myself went into that. Also, the alchemy of stuff is very much about one's connection to things in the world and how inanimate objects are still somehow imbued with your energy and your connectivity because you work with them. So, nothing is in-sentient, everything has sentience, and so I was making a kind of homage to that, and also to the fact of how so much that we use, we don't really need, and to try and bring back that kind of precious connection with things and with matter, and to get out of this disposable headset that we're in, which is creating so much trash, not only in our own lives, but for the planet, and so just some studying all of that and looking at how things can be recycled and the power of stuff in that sense, this handability of it. So, I think that real objects are important, it's wonderful that we have this means to share so much in the way of imagery now, although I do have one big criticism is that so much now does get shared that is unattributed. And when it's not attributed, then you don't get context, and when you don't get context, you don't get lineage, and when you don't get lineage, you don't get rep and depth, you just get eye-gap, and the superficiality which comes, you know, can be brought to even the most rich of images if it's not given context and they're not given those triggers and keys for people to be able to explore deeply if they wish to. And so that creates a kind of trivialization, along with the fact that with the new tools that I've embraced and enjoyed to have, has also become a kind of facility that's spread across and again taken a little bit of the specialness and preciousness away from certain kinds of ways of producing art, which can only be, you can only put your finger back on that once you're able to see the real practice and the real context, and the real lineage of that work, so that it gives you something that's a thread, like Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of war, this array of material that's hitting us all the time. I completely agree. Thinking about lineage, another question from the audiences. You spoke about the impact of seeing the Tantra exhibition at the Hayward in 1973, I think it was. How many important, how important have exhibitions, and I guess I'm adding to it, other artists being for your own practice? Well, we can see how important other artists are, just by looking at how Max and Scholar's books triggered so much creativity in me. And so I think that finding those things figure great. I have never been that keen, although I love to see what other people are doing, but I've never looked that much for contemporaries to be inspiring me. I always find that my inspiration has kind of come already, and even with Max's, it triggered something that was lately, and then it gave me permission, really, to express what was waiting to be expressed. So in that sense, it depends. I can just cite someone who is a very big inspiration, me is Frida Kahlo, and of course that's become almost a cliché now with the popularities that she's had, but it doesn't take away from anything of her essence and who she is as a kind of parent in the art world and overcoming what she did to express herself. And so I find a lot of resonance with her and her way of saying, you know, why do you paint yourself so much? And she said, oh, because I know myself best, and so on. I had seen her work so much in reproductions, and not that much in flesh. And so I went to the opening of her show in New York a year and a half, three years ago, back now. And when I stood in front of her painting of her with the monkeys, I just had tears streaming down my face because the energy that was in there of her felt it, it was palpable. And so those little examples, just the tip of an iceberg of what going to an exhibition and actually experiencing someone else's work can do. I don't think having that experience is anything that can create creativity in someone that can certainly trigger and enrich and inspire. And that goes back to what you were saying about the power of the object again, but some works just have that very particular charge that can make you cry. The last question, unless anybody else has any, please do write them into the Q&A box. The last one, I think we know the answer to, but it's the happy answer. So are there any plans to reprint an exorcism? Well, there aren't any plans in anyone else's mind, except mine yet, I think, but hopefully that will come to pass. I'd have to make decisions when that happens because much as with 50% of the visible woman, I had the two versions and there was a little difference between the two versions. In the first handmade copy, there were 13 more images than those that came into the printed version, but I've reintroduced those into the new edition. So it's a kind of synthesis of the two best of the best, hopefully. With an exorcism, because it was such a deep project, I had books of writing that I did about it, I did film scripts for it, I did so much other work that comes under the surface of what we see with the cryptic one-line titles and the images. And I had intended to do another version of it with text that was making it a little bit more like a journey, not exactly a film script, looking a little bit like that in parts, but a journey through with text. I had a kind of text to guide you as well, and Dragon's Dream, who did Mountain Ecstasy, were going to do that, but then they got put off doing that for obvious reasons, and so it never happened. So if we do an exorcism, it will be interesting to see what version of an exorcism we're going to do. And in the meantime, I did make a film a couple of years back, which is taking us through the whole series because there were only 99 images in printed exorcism books, but there's close to 200 images that I made. And so I put together the whole series, and I have a soundtrack with music, and just me saying the Python city to the pieces, and then at the end, looking at the house and just doing a kind of spontaneous transmission, if you like, around how I saw it all now. And so that was my attempt now in animated film, because I deconstructed ecologies and reconstructed a camera journey into them, a way of, you know, re-presenting it, and I hope to be able to do, you know, a book version too in an optimistic future. Where can people see that film? Is it available anywhere? It's up on Blom&Po's musings at the moment, and I'm hoping to, you know, I haven't actually properly thought about it anywhere yet, so I'm hoping that we'll be able to do something. Maybe when we launch the book, we can have a nice experience. I think that is a good note to close on, unless there's anything final that you want to add. No, just that I'm so happy to be here celebrating this with the, you know, all those hung in there, and photography has, you know, evolved and changed quite a bit over that time. So it's wonderful to be able to track it and to really focus on how important a final tool it is, and that it's not just a convenience on the phone. It's something that it really is a tool for us, and I appreciate it so much, and I bet most people looking in do too. Thank you very much, Penny. Thank you. Thank you for all the questions from the audience too. Yes, thank you everyone. Really appreciate it.