Philomena Epps

Erotic Objects, Erogenous Zones: Fetishism and Sexual Difference (1954-1985)

PhD supervisor: Professor Mignon Nixon
Working title for PhD: Erotic Objects, Erogenous Zones: Fetishism and Sexual Difference (1954-1985)

Philomena Epps

This project is concerned with the relationship between fetishism and sexual difference in multidisciplinary artistic practice. I examine work made by Rose English, Hannah Wilke, and Alina Szapocznikow between 1954 and 1985, surveying their kindred animation of the logic of fetishism, in which the fetish is understood as an overvalued object endowed with a special power. Grounded within feminist art history and psychoanalytic studies, the thesis takes up the fetish as a privileged mode of perversity that complicates psychic and social constructions of the sexed subject. By troubling the fixed structures of fetishism, most notably through its relation to the Freudian castration complex, the stakes of the project call into focus the political implications of appropriating fetishism as a method for sexual liberation. Within this method, I foreground the persistent and strategic role of ambivalence, humour, irony, and play in each artist’s body of work. Paying attention to the nuances of their distinctive geographic contexts, I articulate the relationship between eroticism, gender, and sexuality within the conditions of post-war mass culture and accelerated consumerism. By particularly addressing the circuits of consumption, desire, and pleasure, the project conceptualises and synthesises the relationship between image, spectacle, and the commodity form. The ‘erotic objects’ and ‘erogenous zones’ referred to in the working title indicate two specific modes of fetishistic investment, the object and the encounter, in addition to signalling the project’s extensive engagement with sculpture and performance.

My art criticism has been published by Artforum, ArtReview, Art Monthly, e-flux Criticism, Flash Art, Frieze, and The White Review, among others. I have written on artists for exhibitions, books, and catalogues, including Helen Chadwick, Mona Hatoum, Magali Reus, and Jo Spence. I recently contributed research and writing to the expansive chronology published in the catalogue for Sixties Surreal (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2025).

Publications 

  • ‘Women Artists Together,’ Oxford Art Journal, book review forthcoming in 2026
  • ‘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 

  • ‘Fetishistic, quite exquisite, quite troubling,’ Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures symposium, The Hepworth Wakefield (24 October 2025)
  • ‘Fantasies of Animation: Alina Szapocznikow and Hanka Włodarczyk’s Trace (1976),’ History of Art Graduate Symposium, University College London (9 May 2025)
  • ‘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, ‘Encountering the Body: 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)

Contact philomena.epps.22@ucl.ac.uk

Qualifications 
MA History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013–2014 (Distinction)
BA English Literature, University of Sussex, 2009–2012 (First Class Honours)

Department/faculty roles
Co-editor of Object journal (2023-24)
Member of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art (CSCA)