Erin Dickson

About the work

Expanding on her growing digital sculptures of quotidian, working-class figures, PISSED physically manifests the often-inevitable aftermath of a raucous girls night out, complete with discarded high-heels and greasy take away. 

Deliberately vulgar and subversive, here the word ‘pissed’ is used not only as a verb for the act of urination and as the adjective for drunk, but also as the inevitable outrage caused by public pissing, particularly by women. “We’ve all been conditioned to accept the naked male—even pissing—form as a figure in art history,” says Lucas Zwirner of David Zwirner, London “And the moment you see female figures, it’s all much more complicated”

Inspired by Rembrandt’s Pissing Woman (1631), one of the first of its kind to depict female urination as an everyday act without ecclesiastical ceremony, here in PISSED, tucked around a quiet corner of the Canberra Glassworks covertly squats a woman relieving herself.

PISSED is a means to transgress puritanical and prejudiced social, political, and religious codes of what it means to be indecent, particularly when it comes to gendered stereotypes.

About the artist

Exploring ideas of home through language, culture and vernacular architecture, Erin Dickson’s expansive practice engages tongue-in-cheek themes of ‘Britishness’. Working in the space between craft and digital manufacture, she works both physically and virtually, from processing data to create 3D models to developing systems of correspondence. Through humour, Dickson’s sculpture, video and installations soften deliberately provocative subject matter including British class systems, AI bias, intimacy, community, and isolation.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, most notably at Glasstress, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, as well as the Royal Academy of Arts, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and FACT Liverpool, UK. She has received international grants and awards including an Honorary Diploma from the Jutta Cuny Foundation, Germany, The Kyohei Fujita Memorial Prize from Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Denmark, and a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England.

Dickson lives and works in Bungendore, NSW.