The late artist’s solo work ‘scrambles in male shit for breath’
It’s a hot day in New Cross but visitors to Milly Thompson’s posthumous show at CCA are instantly transported to a cool Ibiza evening via the Balearic chillout music playing in the stairwell and a trio of silk sarongs, printed with imagery of ice-cream sundaes and lobsters on a background of swirling waves and female bodies, wafting overhead in the breeze of an electric fan. As an opening statement, My body temperature is feeling good (Hydra Lux MIX 1/2/3) and the Still Same Sexy series (all 2017) exemplify Thompson’s interest in representing the enduring erotic life of the older woman, while wryly acknowledging, as a middle-aged woman herself, the challenges of maintaining one’s cool.
Thompson died in 2022 at the age of fifty-eight of a brain tumour. During the 1990s she had been a member of the anarchic and disruptive London-based art collective BANK, returning to her own work after the group disbanded in 2003. Thompson’s solo work (this exhibition presents works from 2010) is often underpinned by the institutional critique and class-based social satire honed during her time in BANK, but her artistic project turns conclusively to how to claim desire and pleasure from a woman’s perspective.
Perhaps as an antidote to having been the group’s only female member, Thompson’s solo work barely features men: desire is depicted as women indulging themselves – with delicious food and wine, tanning and swimming, reading and wearing as little as they please – rather than attempting to snare a man. In the short looped video 5000 years ritual VOLCANIC (2013), the camera homes in on a bronzed, topless woman of indeterminate middle age as she potters alone around a rocky cove. Likewise, the middle-aged women lounging in bikinis on tropical beaches in Thompson’s suite of painted portraits – often of friends – appear comfortably self-absorbed and unself-conscious about their bodies, their wrinkles, tummy folds and cellulite unabashedly accentuated by loose, swirling brushstrokes.
Thompson frequently took aim at the impossible fantasies sold by the fashion industry, as with the spoof fashion magazine VUOTO (2012) that she produced with Alison Jones – shown here as part of a display of artist publications and posters – and her Desert Siren (2013) sculptures, a series of wall-based wooden frames enhanced by polystyrene boobs ‘wearing’ clingy dresses inspired by designer adverts of models in a desert. Elsewhere, a glass cabinet displays a range of perfumes created by Thompson for her Shatavari collection (Shatavari being a herb used in Ayurvedic medicine to alleviate menopausal anxiety). On stylishly minimal labels, the perfumes’ evocative names – Invisible, Proposition and Volatile – celebrate midlife women’s changing menopausal moods, while satirising the wellness industry that exploits them.
In her 2016 manifesto, I CHOOSE PAINTING, Thompson addresses the disconnect between her position as a female artist in an era of hotly debated gender theories and political activism that she finds ‘impressive and topical’, and her ‘guilty pleasure’ in choosing traditional, figurative painting with its patriarchal associations. She concludes by unapologetically accepting ‘the hegemony of male materials and let[ting] myself scramble in male shit for breath’, while her thoughts are ‘only of escape, simplicity, sensuality’. But it is precisely in her attitude of defiant self-gratification and honesty about her artistic preferences, and the shamelessness of the midlife women she depicts, that Thompson’s radicality is expressed.
My Body Temperature is Feeling Good at Goldsmiths CCA, London, through 24 August
