The subversive image-maker Wanda Orme celebrates the power of pussy and the sensual landscape of the female form
We debut Orme's latest series of "pussy-forward images, with unapologetic energy."
[W]anda Orme is a distinctive multi-disciplinary visual artist and writer occupying a unique space somewhere between art, academia and the style industry, having spent almost as much time in front of the camera working as a model as she spends behind it. Originally hailing from the Isle of Man, she spent her formative years in London before moving to California to pursue a PhD in Anthropology. Having gained two MAs (in Anthropology and Psychology) in the Sunshine State, she grew frustrated with academic pursuit and began to explore the human animal via more visceral and physiological means. It is perhaps precisely because of the depth and substance of her academic investigation into our species that her photographic work tends to focus on the naked body as a vast landscape of possibility, one upon which she explores themes of emotional resonance, sexuality and escape. In her latest series, published here for the first time, the artist has focused very much – although not exclusively – upon autoerotic clitoral stimulation, and as such investigates the pleasure principle via the only organ that exists purely for the purposes of sexual ecstasy. Here, the outspoken image-maker, who has recently returned to London, tells us why portraying the naked body is a form of resistance, and why she seeks to capture a sensual energy in all of her work that reaches far beyond the confines of the page or screen.
What is your working process as an artist and what inspired you to create this series of images?
My process is driven by resonance and instinct. I follow what draws me and then question it. My work is a product of that conversation between desire and a kind of playful analysis. These images draw from my experience of sexuality and my views upon it– exploring ideas of surplus excess and bloom, along with my experience of censorship (firstly, as a woman with a body, and secondly, as a woman interested in portraying bodies).
In what sense for you are these images a potent symbol of contemporary womanhood?
They are very much so. The sense of potency is important to me–that they have an energy, which exceeds the image. I suppose they are by definition contemporary, but I think there’s something about sexuality and sexual energy that carries across time.
What interested you about portraying female masturbation?
I think there’s still a taboo around female masturbation, and I suppose these images indirectly address this. But the choice of images was more about a certain sexual energy, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, than specifically masturbation. They are pussy-forward images, with unapologetic energy. The collage is not about hiding the pussy, but conveying something of pussy-as-sensation–a feeling. I hope women might enjoy these images, in a way that, for some, perhaps would not be possible with the raw original.
Is there a sense of reclamation in this work from tropes of the male gaze?
Yes, but I don’t want to chastise the male gaze. It is a re-appropriation, but I’m also hoping to reveal the potential power and beauty of these images–their non-hegemonic, celebratory aspects.
How has a career in modelling framed your notion of womanhood?
I think I’m lucky in that my own notion of womanhood was pretty well formed by the time I started modelling. I had a strong sense of my body through training in dance, and of my own sexuality through having the opportunity to explore it. Working in fashion allowed me to return attention to the body after a long stint in academia in a way that I’m grateful for. It was liberating.
What is your definition of beauty and how do these images play into that definition?
I find it hard to define beauty–it’s something I feel, a response. I know it (for myself) when I see it. I suppose in terms of beauty being a sensation, these images speak to that in that their creation was driven by sensation.
Would you say you were working in a tradition of artist-photographers?
I’d say we all work in a tradition or a lineage, but I don’t trace a specific trajectory through a single discipline–mine is a bit more haphazard. The punk collage artist Linder comes to mind in specific reference to this series. I’ve been influenced by explorers of eroticism and unrecognised others–Schiele, Bataille, Mollino, Woodman, great documenters of sensation, religious iconography, poetry, gentle revelators, such as Ovid, Sappho and Neruda.
How does your background in anthropology inform your artistic practice?
I’d say it’s almost impossible to separate myself from my background in anthropology. It honed my attention to a kind of listening–non-reductive, without judgement–a way of engaging difference, and a sensitivity to domination. It also grew in me the desire to give space and voice to that which is unheard, along with an appreciation for the ever-shifting ingenuity of forms of resistance and subversion.
Is the body a battleground, a playground or both?
I think it’s both and that’s the beauty of it. Portraying naked bodies is both a celebration and a form of resistance, protest; a demand for acknowledgment of what is (we are, after all, all naked).
Do you think the printed form is it still a more powerful way to disseminate art and photography than the digital form?
My attraction is to analogue, but digital has huge power and reach on a certain immediate scale–this can’t be denied. But across time, I think that print is incredibly powerful. I collect old photographs and its amazing to hold in your hands something that’s 100 years old and to have that immediate window onto a time, a place–I wonder if in 100 years anyone will see much of our digital footprint, or whether it will be lost in the sea of ones and zeros.
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