SALLY SMART

Robert Lindsay Gallery, Melbourne 
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1994

'Sally Smart is absorbed in the strategies of perversion, lured by the inducements of sin. With no respect for the formalities of category she draws eclectically on cultural, perceptual and political practices, which subvert or defy the norm, and appropriates their strategies for her wilful and persistent exploration of what constitutes femininity'.¹

Curious Anatomies (Disembroidered) was one of ten works included in Smart's 'Delicate Cutting' exhibition in 1994. Delicate self-cutting is identified as an 'exclusively female psychological disorder which deals witrh gender difference at the site of the body. Where males might engage in "coarse cutting" involving deep wounding or even amputation, females focus on the surface, the skin and hair, and superficially defile its perfection'.² In Curious Anatomies the initial observation is of two female figures depicted as collaged, playful 'doll-like' cut-outs. One of them has no shoulders or arms, her legs carefully placed horizontally to her body, a tail pinned on to her spotted dress and over-sized eye stamped on to the back of her head. First impressions peel away, like skin, to a world of fetish, fear and displacement. The child-like cut-out becomes increasingly discomforting for all its appeal as a work of art.

1. King, A., Delicate Cutting, Robert Lindsay Gallery, Melbourne, 1994, unpaginated.