Philomena Epps

PhD supervisor: Professor Mignon Nixon
Working title for PhD: Erotic Objects, Erogenous Zones: Fetishism and Sexual Difference (1957–1984)

My project examines the relationship between fetishism and sexual difference in artistic practice across the late twentieth century. I focus on work made by Rose English, Alina Szapocznikow, and Hannah Wilke. Despite their distinct contexts, I survey their kindred animation of the logic of fetishism, in which the fetish is understood as an overvalued object endowed with a special power. By exposing, reworking, and unfixing the structures of fetishism, the implications of their fetishistic impulses are specifically interpreted in relation to sexual liberation. In turn, the stakes of the project call into focus the socio-political implications of appropriating ‘female fetishism’ as a potential strategy. The research articulates an original field of enquiry regarding the construction and mediation of gender, identity, and sexuality within the conditions of mass culture and accelerated consumerism. Addressing exchanges of consumption, desire, and pleasure, the project conceptualises and synthesises the relationship between perversion, spectacle, and the commodity. Informed by the artists’ mutual engagement with multidisciplinary practices, the research integrates an analysis of dance, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. The inter-disciplinary scope of the project also contends with and mirrors the heterogeneity and mutability intrinsic to the fetish object itself, with a particular consideration of the role of ambivalence, eroticism, irony, and play. 

My art criticism has been published by Artforum, ArtReview, Art Monthly, e-flux Criticism, Flash Art, Frieze, and The White Review, among others. I also have written on numerous artists for exhibition texts and catalogue essays, including Heidi Bucher, Helen Chadwick, Mona Hatoum, Nicola L., Ketty La Rocca, Magali Reus, and Jo Spence. 

Publications 

• ‘Fetishistic, quite exquisite, quite troubling,’ in Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, ed. Laura Smith (London: Thames and Hudson, 2025), pp. 133-161
• ‘Ballet Hooves: Rose English and the Spectacle of Fetishism,’ Object, vol. 25 (2024), pp. 28-50
• ‘Yvonne Rainer: The Choreography of Film,’ The Moving Image Review & Art Journal, vol. 8, no. 1+2 (September 2019), pp. 184-192

Conference papers and presentations 

• ‘Like a Motion Picture, Like a Living Dance: Persona and Performativity in Hannah Wilke’s So Help Me Hannah (1978-85),’ College Art Association, 113th Annual Conference, New York (15 February 2025)
• ‘Getting Snookered,’ Sarah Lucas and Psychoanalysis, CSCA Workshop, University College London (21 February 2024)
• ‘Life or Theatre? Visual Autofiction and Feminism,’ AUTO-, Royal College of Art, London (23 May 2019)

Teaching

• Course Tutor, Modern and Contemporary Art in London, History of Art, UCL (Spring 2025)
• PGTA, History of Art and its Objects, History of Art, UCL (Spring 2024)
• Writing Support TA, BA1, History of Art, UCL (Autumn 2022)

Awards

• 2024: Association for Art History, Scholarly Research Grant
• 2022-26: London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP) Studentship

Additional Lectures/Talks

• ‘Sigmund Freud’s Dora (1979)’, CSCA screening and discussion event, University College London (20 November 2024)
• 'Hélène Vanel at the 1938 International Surrealism Exhibition', Motor Dance Journal launch event, ICA, London (15 November 2022)
• ‘Women Artists and Surrealism’, guest lecture for the online Women and Art Summer School, Sotheby's Institute of Art (13 July 2020)
• ‘The Art of the Avant-Garde’ and ‘The Personal is Political,’ two-part lecture as part of The Art of Feminism, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (11 January; 22 February 2020)
• ‘On Meat Joy,’ introduction to Meat Joy (1964), Evidentiary Bodies: Celebrating Barbara Hammer & Carolee Schneemann, LUX Moving Image, London (14 July 2019)

Curated Exhibitions/Events

• Bodily Objects exhibition, work by Penny Slinger, Rose English, Renate Bertlmann, and Helen Chadwick, presented online by Richard Saltoun Gallery (1 May–30 June 2020) and realised by Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (17 July—30 August 2020)
• Beyond the Body, screening programme, films by Chantal Akerman, Marcie Begleiter, Bryony Gillard, and Sally Potter, among others, The Horse Hospital, London (2018–2019)