Somerset House’s summer exhibition-as part of its special 25th birthday programme-explores how digital culture and technologies have shaped definitions of beauty and human identity today.
Interactive installations and thought-provoking works from over 20 international artists.
Pioneering works on display by ORLAN and Amalia Ulmanhighlight how the digital infiltrates the material world in two performance art pieces.
Minne Atairu, Ben Cullen Williams and Isamaya Ffrench investigate artificial intelligence’s perception of beauty by using machine learning and generative software to create visually striking portraits.
Constructing alternate identities beyond human boundaries in the form of avatars are spotlighted by artists including Harriet Davey, Frederik Heyman and Andrew Thomas Huang, whose series of avatars of singer Björk originally debuted at Somerset House for the 2016 show Björk Digital.
Somerset House celebrates its 25th birthday in 2025 and its role as London’s home of cultural innovators by delivering a programme that offers alternative perspectives and challenges conventions during its milestone year. Virtual Beauty, an exhibition exploring the impact of digital technologies on definitions of beauty today offers an original approach to a key issue of our time. Curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Mathilde Friisand Bunny Kinney, Virtual Beauty raises questions around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and identity in the post-internet era, featuring over 20 compelling works from international artists working across sculpture, photography, installation and video.
From social media filters and artificial intelligence to biometrics and dating apps, the works by emerging and established artists presented in Virtual Beauty examine how we are more self-aware and calculated in the way we present ourselves publicly than ever before. A new generation has come of age that has only lived in a world where the idea of digital self-curation is a part of their everyday lives. Crossing between the virtual and physical, the exhibition highlights how questions of beauty are inherent to the proliferation of portable devices and screens on which people look at themselves every day and share these altered, enhanced, or filtered identities with the world. These curated identities exist beyond the boundaries of traditional media and explore how individuals can reclaim and empower themselves. Virtual Beauty reconsiders who holds the power to define conventions of beauty today and the very definition of human identity.
This major exhibition foregrounds their shared commitment to using humour and abstract form to ask important questions about sexuality and bodies.
The influential critic and curator Lucy Lippard dubbed this kind of work ‘abstract erotic’, and in 1966, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams were the only women artists included in Lippard’s ground-breaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Prior to the emergence of the women’s movement, these artists engaged with a feminist politics of the body with their visceral, playful, and abstract forms in materials such as latex, expanding foam, string, and plaster. As Lippard later reflected, ‘I can see now that I was looking for “feminist art”’.
This is the first time The Courtauld will stage an ambitious group exhibition of this kind, with abstract sculpture filling the gallery spaces in bold and unconventional ways. Abstract Erotic features important loans from distinguished public and private collections in Europe and America, many of which are rarely seen due to their inherent fragility.
Alongside iconic 20th century artists Bourgeois and Hesse, the exhibition celebrates Alice Adams, whose extraordinary sculptural works of the 1960s are of equivalent power and originality. This is the first exhibition of her work in the UK and most substantial in a museum context.
The exhibition is grounded in the research and teaching of Professor Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art, most notably her 2012 book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America. Applin is Director of the Centre of the Art of the Americas at The Courtauld Institute of Art and co-curated the exhibition with Dr Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Courtauld Gallery.
Playing with different slip cast froms to create a collage form. I would like to decorate with my own decals but have found that the red doesn’t work very well.
Playing with slip cast froms.
Creating collages and exploring ideas to use as surface decoration for the slip cast forms exploring objectification…
Using my own decals to add messages to the ceramic forms.
PCollages exploring the shoe slip forms exploring objectification.
Exploring the use of lip images to explore sexuality when used to decorate the ceramic forms.
“Loaded Beauty”
Simultaneously seductive and menacing, Loaded Beauty positions the high heel a long-standing symbol of femininity, desire, and constraint as a site of conflict. Adorned with fragmented female forms, the shoe reflects how women’s bodies have been sculpted, displayed, and consumed throughout history. Atop it sits a gun: a blunt, inescapable symbol of power, violence, and control.
This fusion of elegance and armament invites layered readings. Is the weapon an external threat, or an inherited burden? Does it suggest defence, domination, or the inevitability of harm? The piece evokes the legacy of the muse and the martyr—where beauty is both armour and target, where the body is politicised and eroticised in equal measure. Loaded Beauty does not resolve these tensions; it walks with them.
“Power Play”
Glossed in red lips and lifted by a vibrator heel, this ceramic high heel walks the tightrope between sexual autonomy and objectification. “Power Play” interrogates the blurred boundaries between empowerment and performance, asking who this pleasure is for and who’s really in control. By merging symbols of desire, beauty, and fetish, the piece exposes the contradictions women navigate in expressing sexuality within a culture that commodifies it. It’s both a wink and a warning: liberation doesn’t always come in seductive packaging.
More collages exploring misogyny.
“Born Into It”
Bright, cheerful yellow clashes with the eerie presence of two sculpted baby arms, clinging to a high-heeled shoe not made for movement, but for performance. Born Into It explores the inheritance of gendered expectations. How even from birth, femininity is something imposed, shaped, and carried. The baby arms, both tender and unsettling, speak to generational cycles of social conditioning: the weight of beauty, the pressure to nurture, and the early internalization of what a woman “should” become.
This work asks: at what point does the performance begin? And who benefits when girlhood is handed stilettos instead of freedom?
Title: “Silenced”
Medium: Glazed Ceramic
Year:
2025
“Silenced” is a striking ceramic sculpture featuring three disembodied heads, each with their eyes, mouth, and ears deliberately covered—evoking enforced blindness, silence, and deafness. These heads are placed atop a pair of ceramic high-heeled shoes, their heels formed by exaggerated phallic structures. The piece serves as a bold commentary on the objectification of women and the systemic nature of misogyny. The covered senses symbolise the ways in which women are conditioned to not see, speak, or hear the injustices they endure—reflecting societal pressures to remain passive, compliant, and complicit. The use of phallic heels underscores the dominance of male desire and control in shaping female identity, while the high heels themselves reference the beauty standards and sexualisation imposed on women. By merging innocence, sexuality, and silence into one unsettling form, Silenced critiques the ways in which female bodies are both pedestalised and oppressed. Visually jarring yet deeply resonant, the work forces viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about power, gender, and the cost of silence.
More sketches.
“Sharp Standards”
This red ceramic shoe, studded with unforgiving metal nails, stands as a stark metaphor for the sharp and often invisible expectations imposed on women. Crafted to be admired but clearly unwearable, it embodies the painful sacrifices demanded by society’s rigid ideals of beauty and femininity. “Sharp Standards” challenges viewers to reflect on how fashion celebrated as empowermen can simultaneously enforce discomfort, silence, and constraint. It’s a call to question who truly sets the rules we’re asked to follow, and at what cost.
“Tread Lightly”
This striking blue ceramic shoe, bristling with spikes and balanced on a boldly phallic heel, confronts the complex intersections of power, desire, and control. It playfully subverts traditional symbols of masculinity and femininity, forcing us to reconsider who really holds the balance in the performance of gender. “Tread Lightly” invites viewers to navigate the sharp edges of societal expectations—where strength and vulnerability coexist, and where the line between empowerment and objectification is provocatively blurred.
“Gilded Burden”
Lustrous in red and impossibly poised on a gold-tipped phallic heel, Gilded Burden confronts the viewer with the seductive performance of femininity as both spectacle and subjugation. The shoe, a classic symbol of glamour and desire, is held aloft by an unmistakable emblem of masculinity coated in gold to suggest value, prestige, or reward. But beneath the shine lies a provocation: What does it mean to stand on a system that fetishizes, supports, and controls all at once? Gilded Burden challenges the conflation of power and beauty, questioning how much of femininity is shaped in response to male desire, and how often empowerment is merely repackaged compliance just shinier.
This is not a pedestal. It’s a pressure point.
Title: “Support System”
Medium: Glazed Ceramic
Year:
2025
“Support System” presents a fragmented ceramic sculpture of a woman’s torso balanced precariously on a single high-heeled ceramic shoe. Devoid of head, arms, and legs, the torso becomes an anonymous object—reduced to curves and surface, echoing the way women’s bodies are often commodified and dismembered in visual culture. The high heel, a symbol of both femininity and constraint, serves as the literal foundation of the figure, highlighting how beauty standards and performative gender expectations underpin societal value systems imposed on women. The fragility of ceramic emphasises the tension between strength and vulnerability, while the imbalance of the form evokes the instability of self-worth when built upon external validation. With minimalist elegance and unsettling clarity, Support System critiques the burdens placed on the female body to conform, perform, and endure. It invites viewers to consider the structures—both cultural and physical—that shape, elevate, and ultimately limit women’s autonomy.
Showing my work at UClay.
Uclay exhibition.
Experimenting with slip cast froms.
Taking recently slip cast forms and manipulating them into different forms.
Success using a white earthenware glaze
Own design decals.
Ann Summers rabbit used for the slip cast mould.
Another object for slip casting!
Work fresh out of the kiln.
“Tread Lightly”
This striking blue ceramic shoe, bristling with spikes and balanced on a boldly phallic heel, confronts the complex intersections of power, desire, and control. It playfully subverts traditional symbols of masculinity and femininity, forcing us to reconsider who really holds the balance in the performance of gender. “Tread Lightly” invites viewers to navigate the sharp edges of societal expectations—where strength and vulnerability coexist, and where the line between empowerment and objectification is provocatively blurred.
Title: “Trophy”
Medium: Glazed Ceramic
Year:
2025
“Trophy” is a bold, confrontational ceramic sculpture—a vibrant yellow high-heeled shoe adorned with aggressive spikes and balanced on a glossy blue phallic heel. At once seductive and dangerous, the piece explores the complex dynamics of objectification, desire, and power. The bright, almost playful palette contrasts sharply with the sculpture’s unsettling form, drawing attention to how objectification is often masked by glamour, fashion, and consumer appeal. The spiked surface suggests both defence and danger, hinting at the pain hidden beneath the polished exterior women are often expected to maintain. The phallic heel speaks directly to the male gaze and the power structures that underpin traditional ideals of femininity—where a woman’s worth is constructed, elevated, and supported by male desire. “Trophy” challenges the viewer to confront how sexuality, control, and violence are often entangled, packaged, and displayed in everyday culture. Through its striking form and subversive symbolism, the work asks: who is being displayed, and for whom?
“Under His Heel”
This glossy red ceramic shoe, striking and provocative, is anchored by a heel shaped unmistakably like a phallus—a stark symbol of the persistent dominance of patriarchal power in the realm of beauty and femininity. “Under His Heel” exposes the uncomfortable truth of how women’s bodies and identities have long been shaped, controlled, and even weaponized through male-centred narratives. The piece challenges us to question who truly supports whom in the dance of desire and domination, inviting a reckoning with the often-unspoken dynamics beneath the surface of glamour.
Adding the Ann Summer vibrator as a heel. This was problematic trying to produce a good standard of finish.
Experimenting with forms to create a wall sculpture.
Kiln firing.
Experimenting with adding a different heel.
Using underglaze to create a bright finish.
Title: “Untitled (Support)”
Medium: Glazed
Ceramic
Year: 2025
This glossy black high-heeled ceramic shoe, sleek and seductive in form, is disrupted by a bold and confrontational detail: a phallic heel. At once striking and subversive, the work examines how traditional symbols of femininity—like the stiletto—are often constructed within frameworks of male desire and control. By replacing the heel with a penis, the sculpture exposes the uncomfortable truth beneath the surface: the ways in which women’s beauty, sexuality, and power are frequently propped up by patriarchal systems. Balancing elegance with provocation, Untitled (Support) invites viewers to question who benefits from the elevation of the female form—and at what cost. The shoe, an emblem of both empowerment and objectification, becomes a site of tension between autonomy and expectation. In challenging misogyny, the work does not reject femininity but reclaims it—making visible the power structures it often conceals.
Title: “Tip of the Power”
Glossed in black and perched atop a phallic gold-tipped heel,Tip of the Power struts unapologetically into the uncomfortable terrain where sexuality, dominance, and spectacle converge. The piece transforms the high heel—a historic symbol of femininity and submission—into a weaponized object supported, quite literally, by a gilded emblem of male power.
The gold tip adds a layer of allure and absurdity, suggesting how patriarchy dresses control in prestige and desire. Is the shoe standing tall, or being propped up? Tip of the Power critiques how women are expected to navigate systems built on male-centred values, often forced to embody ideals they did not author, while carrying the burden of keeping it all seductive.This is not simply fashion—it’s function, fetish, and farce.
Using different slip cast moulds to create different forms.
Experimenting with black slip to create slip cast forms.
Black slip cast forms and steel nails exploring the pleasure and pain of behind shoes and misogyny.
Making a slip cast mould from a gun.
Experimenting with the shoe form and the slip cast gun.
Experimenting with under glazes to create a bright shiny form.
Yellow underglaze.
Black slip cast forms and steel nails exploring the pleasure and pain of behind shoes and misogyny.
Making a slip cast mould from a gun.
Title: “Balancing Act”
Elegant yet absurd, this ceramic high heel with its oversized blue heel exaggerates both the beauty standard and the burden it carries. Balancing Act reflects the precarious nature of femininity as performance where grace is demanded, but the foundations are often unwieldy, unstable, or outsized heel, disproportionately large and visually dominant, symbolizes the weight of social expectation: the pressure to remain poised, polished, and pleasing, even when the support structure is impractical or performative.
The piece questions what women are asked to uphold and at what personal cost to meet ideals not of their own making. Is the wearer empowered or simply adapting to a system not built for her?
Title: “Object Lessons”
Once pristine and whole, this white ceramic high heel now bears the scars of a culture that dresses violence in civility. Sliced apart and etched with misogynistic phrases, the shoe becomes both artifact and indictment exposing the casual brutality hidden within everyday expectations of femininity. “Object Lessons” confronts the viewer with the literal fragmentation of the female form under the weight of societal judgment, beauty standards, and gendered messaging. What remains is not just a broken object, but a reflection of how women are often spoken about, spoken for, and silenced one cut at a time.
Purple under glaze.
Different objects as heels.
Used a metallic glaze which didn’t work and dripped onto the kiln shelf.
Black casting slip
Attaching the bust to the heel
Using different forms to create the heel.
Title: “Golden Restraints”
This pristine white ceramic heel, adorned with gleaming gold spikes, embodies the paradox of beauty as both adornment and constraint. The spikes, while decorative, double as a barrier, reminders of the pain often masked by elegance and luxury. “Golden Restraints” critiques how societal ideals glorify female perfection while simultaneously imposing sharp limitations, turning symbols of empowerment into instruments of control. It asks us to reflect on the fine line between celebration and restriction in the performance of femininity.
Title: “Power Play”
Glossed in red lips and lifted by a vibrator heel, this ceramic high heel walks the tightrope between sexual autonomy and objectification. “Power Play” interrogates the blurred boundaries between empowerment and performance, asking who this pleasure is for and who’s really in control. By merging symbols of desire, beauty, and fetish, the piece exposes the contradictions women navigate in expressing sexuality within a culture that commodifies it. It’s both a wink and a warning: liberation doesn’t always come in seductive packaging.
An assortment of different slip cast shoes decorated with decals and finished with a clear earthenware glaze.
Ceramic Wales
Experimenting with different slip cast forms
Slip cast forms
Mix it up to experiment with different messages
Experimenting
In conclusion, my work with ceramic shoes serves as both a personal and political response to the intricate web of expectations surrounding femininity. By appropriating a traditionally gendered object and rendering it unwearable, I expose the contradictions and constraints women face, while also reclaiming space for autonomy, complexity, and transformation. These sculptures do not seek to neatly resolve the tensions they evoke—instead, they dwell in the friction between beauty and discomfort, vulnerability and power, the performed and the authentic. In doing so, they resist the simplistic narratives that have historically been imposed on women’s identities and bodies.
Clay, with its rich symbolic and physical potential, becomes a collaborator in this resistance. Its malleability allows for intuitive expression, while its permanence after firing mirrors the enduring strength beneath what is too often dismissed as delicate or decorative. Through this material, I confront the invisibility, ridicule, and objectification often aimed at women, but I also celebrate the resilience and creativity born from those pressures. The ceramic shoes are not meant to fit anyone—they are meant to make space: for questions, for confrontation, for laughter, and for power reimagined.
Importantly, my practice does not rest solely in critique. It is equally a celebration of the strange, joyful, and layered realities of being a woman in today’s world. The playful distortions and exaggerated forms in my sculptures reflect a willingness to embrace absurdity, to push boundaries, and to find beauty in imperfection. Through humour and subversion, I invite viewers to engage with femininity not as a static ideal but as an evolving, lived experience—one that defies containment and thrives in contradiction.
Ultimately, these works are vessels for storytelling, resistance, and reinvention. They honour the women who came before, challenge the structures that still constrain, and imagine new ways of being that are unapologetically complex. In a culture that often demands simplicity and compliance, my ceramic shoes insist on nuance, on presence, and on the power of the women as a creative and transformative force. They are not just sculptures—they are declarations. And through them, I aim to contribute to a broader, ongoing conversation about gender, art, and the courage it takes to shape one’s own identity.
