The first big woman to greet you on arrival at Colchester’s Firstsite gallery is Fat Doris. She’s wearing black tights and brown wedge shoes and is instantly recognisable as a Sarah Lucas bunny, except this woman is no longer provocatively slutty with legs akimbo, but is slouched in an armchair, with rolls of stomach that erupt into four tied-off sausage ends, representing both boobs and brains. As an evocation of the status of older women, she packs an undeniable punch, but she also embodies the curatorial weakness of this show: it’s not about making radical new connections, but about being part of a cool gang with origins in Freeze, the 1988 show that created the YBA brand and made Lucas’s name.
This is frustrating, because there are some wonderful artists among the 25 exhibitors, all of whom are here at Lucas’s invitation, but there’s also a wearying impulse to be shocking for its own sake, as in the repetitive expletives of Erica Åkerlund’s Fuck ’Em embroidery, which hangs around the cafe area like a mouthy teenager. Taboo-busting text has a place in feminist discourse, of course, but it’s more thoughtfully employed in Fiona Banner’s 2006 work Nude Standing. In lieu of a portrait, this describes, in intimate detail, the body of actor Samantha Morton, who later went on to enact the description in the three-minute video displayed alongside it.
Maggi Hambling is here with two pieces, including a large white plaster blob entitled Henrietta Eating a Meringue. Although casual visitors wouldn’t know it, it’s a tribute to the heroic hedonism of the artist Henrietta Moraes, who carried on eating and drinking all the wrong things after being diagnosed with diabetes. Moraes was a muse of Francis Bacon, and an habitué of Soho’s Colony Room Club, which is the subject in a joyous wall-sized photo collage by Millie Laws that seems to be colonising its own room with images from a riotous past of girls (who included Hambling and Lucas) behaving badly.
There are points at which a perspective hoves into view if you stand in the right place. Babies parachute from the vagina of a cloth torso by Renata Adela, overlooked by an imposing self-portrait by Sue Webster, whose pregnant belly juts out of a jacket studded with Siouxsie and the Banshees badges. Through an archway, in a repeating photographic frieze by Georgina Starr, a woman lies on her back, with a balloon floating between her scissored legs. Is she practising her pelvic floor exercises in some antenatal boot camp like a good mother-to-be?
![Losing Hand [detail] 2023.](https://media.guim.co.uk/1b46ba03b252b4f48ad60d5fb2d3290f60f8f85f/0_93_3024_1814/1000.jpg)
Some of the most eloquent and quietly subversive works involve fabrics. Rachel Howard interrogates the machismo of abstract art in two striking oil paintings that create slabs of pictorial space from intricate lacework. A light box in the floor reveals a tiny raptor soaring in a swirl of threads, by Abigail Lane. Old dungarees are commandeered by Phillippa Clayden into a richly-textured, two-sided picture of a spectral figure who is simultaneously so there and not there that you yearn to reach out and touch it to make sure.
Does it matter if the curatorial principle is – as Lucas has joked – cronyism? Well yes it does. The works span 40 years, but there’s no context or chronology. A standout picture by Sonia Coode-Adams, of a woman sitting in a wicker-backed chair against a richly patterned tablecloth, was painted in 1984. Coode-Adams gave up years ago because, like so many women artists, she felt she couldn’t make a go of it. All credit to Lucas for tracking her down. But the show doesn’t give her anywhere to go, because it doesn’t embed her in anything more significant than being one of Sarah’s friends.
Big Women is at Firstsite, Colchester, until 18 June
