Plinth

Consider for instance her fascination with depicting dicks. Dicks aren’t a typical subject for feminist artists. The focus has and continues to be more on reclaiming the objectification of the female body and for good reason: penises, literal and symbolic, have been given way too much air time throughout history. But to ignore their existence – men’s existence – is obviously problematic. The alternative Nicola L seems to propose is to not do as they do by suppressing or rendering men invisible, but to reimagine them, and the human body more broadly, as a malleable form, an artistic medium or even a space.

In the first room of the exhibition a shiny soft sculpture of a giant, blue man sits slumped against a wall, his chin coyly bent towards one shoulder, his oversized legs, arm and penis lying limply in a heap on the floor. There is an undercurrent of violence – this man has been dismembered (pun intended) – but it’s symbolic rather than confronting, more about sensuality and participation. It’s a sculpture, like much of Nicola L’s work and despite the bossy signs around the gallery, that invites touch and recomposition. Hers is a man that you could use as a climbing frame, fashion as a pillow or, as Nicola L does elsewhere, a piece of furniture or an appliance.

Alongside several of these soft, fragmented and compliant men, Nicola L subverts the historic objectification of women by literalising it. Her femme commodes turn a stereotypical female form into a cabinet with handles positioned on the nipples and pelvis while the hybrid soft sculpture The Little TV Woman (1969) resembles a kind of retro sex doll with no facial features except for a round, mesh mouth. There are more suggestively placed handles and doors and a screen placed within her abdomen that plays a message on repeat: ‘I am the last woman object. You can take my lips, Touch my breasts, Caress my stomach, My sex. But I repeat it, it is the last time.’

These works are more direct and sincere than the pénétrables. They get the message across, but to me, they felt a little bit like a dead-end. Reading The Little TV Woman’s warning, I found myself thinking, ‘Okay yes, but what then? And what if it isn’t the last time?’ In the UK alone, there has been enough repeated violence against women in recent years to prove that stern words are not enough. We need action that not only calls for change but that imagines new ways of existing in the world together. I’m not suggesting that Nicola L’s pénétrables are the answer to anything, but they are a reminder that the best kind of art has the potential to disrupt not just validate what we already know.

There’s wonderful film footage of these suits being worn by a group of people in the midst of crowds at the entrance to a subway underpass. The pénétrables are attached to wooden stretcher bars so their movements are awkward and cumbersome, intentionally disrupting the flow and mundanity of the everyday commute. Other pénétrables carry slogans relating to the environment, equality and peace. A banner bearing imprints for 11 heads reads ‘Same skin for everybody’; another proclaims, ‘We want to breathe.’ There’s a furry carpet with niches for five bodies to zip themselves into and a full-sized, dark purple fur room which visitors can enter and interact with, either by inserting themselves into one of the suits built into the walls or by clambering into the space through the spherical opening. It might have been a different experience should we have encountered, in one of the dark corners, a body burrowed into the fur but when we visited we were the only ones inside the installation. I found it deeply calming, like how I imagine it might feel to be a little creature hibernating in a nest. My ten-month-old son crawled around, rubbed his palms across the fabric and then curled up for a sleep.

By Millie Walton