Sophy Rickett

As young artists in the mid-1990s, we were trying to get our work seen while negotiating the realities of housing and earning a living. I began the project Pissing Women about a year after graduating from my BA in Photography. My day job, temping at the Financial Times, gave me a new insight into the structures and rituals of the corporate world – an environment that felt unfamiliar and one in which I didn’t really belong. At college, we’d spent years analysing the world through a language of opposition – to mainstream politics, corporations, patriarchy and prevailing codes of behaviour – and then I found myself inside the very systems we had been critiquing. I became increasingly interested in how environments condition our understanding of the world, shaping perception, behaviour and experience.

This work was originally made for an artist-run space called Plummet, on the top floor of a council block on City Road near Angel. The exhibition, Stream, featured work by me, Carey Young and Rut Blees Luxemburg. It was one of the first times we’d exhibited outside college and we each developed a new project. Plummet was part of a wider artist-led community that included Mark Aerial Waller, Melanie Carvalho, Tina Keane, Pete Jones and Billy Shoebridge. It offered us a way of getting our work into the world and beginning to negotiate the artworld on our own terms.

Rut and I spent many nights looking for locations that were quiet but still carried the visual language of the city. The final installation comprised three photographs, each made at a significant location: Vauxhall Bridge near the MI6 building, Old Street on the edge of the City, and beside the telecommunications satellites in Silvertown – sites representing defence and espionage, finance, and global communications at a moment when mobile phones were becoming mainstream.

The series has been described as provocative, but that wasn’t my primary intention. At the time, men pissing in public was commonplace, so it mattered that the gesture wasn’t portrayed as swaggering or reactive. I wanted it to appear mindful and deliberate, as though these women knew exactly what they were doing, without fear or slipping into caricature. What interested me wasn’t the act itself so much as what happened when women performed it in these spaces, deliberately resisting the codes of behaviour normally expected of them.

^{Sophy Rickett is an artist who lives in London. She talked to Enrico Tassi.}