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Art about sex is usually funny, particularly when it tries not to be. Most of Catherine Bell's artwork is directly about sexual fetishes and the transference of suppressed desire into violent or obsessive behaviour, particularly the reduction of the (usually female) body to a de-humanised object. Sado-masochistic references abound. However Bell's frankly steamy subject matter is presented with a dry, cool sense of humour which steers clear of unwittingly comical prurience and naivete. Bell has a background working as a carer for the aged and for AIDS patients. Her attitudes toward the human body are practical and non-sensational and her work is too detached and intellectualised to be seriously regarded as erotica. It deals not so much with sex as with the imagery that deliberately or inadvertently reflects it.
In the mid-1990s, before departing for London, Oxford, then Paris where she now lives, Bell attracted considerable interest with installations and drawings that combined various metaphors, symbols, analogies and derogatory slang words emphasising the uneasiness generated in Western society by most forms of sexuality.The installations were elaborate: for example, Coitus Interruptus, 1994, now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, was originally part of a tworoom installation. It includes a wall of customised vehicle number plates, a field of toy whirligig windmills, wooden phalluses with rope quoits over them, a clock and an X-ray. In her drawings Bell arranged a distinctly unromantic marriage between genitalia and domestic implements. The tangled but sharply defined lines of her small, hard-edged black and white works on paper provided a distilled version of the volatile mix of ideas in the installations. The drawings allayed any suspicion that the chain reaction of sexual puns, which... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline