Emi­ly Floyd
Tem­ple of the Female Eunuch

Con­tin­u­ing Emi­ly Floyd’s engage­ment with the mod­ern lit­er­ary can­non, The Tem­ple of The Female Eunuch con­sists of large sculp­tur­al fig­ures, sur­round­ed by a field of wood­en blocks inscribed with ques­tions and state­ments tak­en from The Female Eunuch by Ger­maine Greer.

From a per­son­al per­spec­tive, the work has allowed Floyd to explore ques­tions of iden­ti­ty – her time and place – and more broad­ly it aims to pro­voke and con­tribute to ongo­ing debate on fem­i­nism, and fem­i­nism and art mak­ing. The work is a mon­u­ment to the forces required to make rev­o­lu­tion. The impos­ing wood­en fig­ures were devel­oped from the head­less tor­so on the front cov­er of the first edi­tion of The Female Eunuch and the 100 wood­en blocks ref­er­ence the wood­en blocks that Floyd remem­bers from her child­hood and which, in the ​‘70s, were used to devel­op children’s spa­tial cog­ni­tion and prob­lem solv­ing abil­i­ties. The aes­thet­ic and the mate­ri­als – vinyl and pok­er work – are delib­er­ate­ly ​“folk”, 70s and evoca­tive of Rael archi­tec­ture and ​“earth moth­ers”. The bub­ble-styled text reorders Greer’s state­ments and words to raise ques­tions and encour­age debate.

Acknowl­edg­ing the flur­ry of muse­um exhi­bi­tions in 2007 of ​“fem­i­nist art” Floyd’s instal­la­tion posits ques­tions of whether fem­i­nism should be only a social move­ment; fem­i­nist art has a style; fem­i­nism is locked in the 70s; what sort of art­work can a fem­i­nist make and does fem­i­nism have a future.