Lick And Lather: A Narrative Analysis

The presentation of the fourteen busts recalls displays of older traditional art, such as in a museum. Upon closer inspection, there is a clear subversion of such, where some of the figures are transformed and their surfaces tampered. We not only see unconventional surfaces but also make and material. The artist is making a comment on and questioning the status quo.

The title Lick and Lather is a succinct description of the artist’s process that employs the snappy alliteration of a modern consumerist product. It refers to blatant acts, rather than descriptions of what we are presented with. This decision may be because this piece is heavily dependent on its process; whereby the focus of the work was the act of gently and tenderly defacing busts of herself whilst also hinting at an underlying sensual nature.

Due to the nature of the self-portrait, the work is inherently about identity and how Antoni

Whereby eating is an everyday, necessary act, the gestural marks left by Antoni’s tongue on the surface of the busts leave the viewer to piece together an imagining of the process. Cleaning oneself too is an everyday, necessary act. The selectively and sometimes heavily worn, smoothed over surfaces implicate to the viewer the artist in the process of creating such a surface.

The implied intimacy that is evidenced by the surface of these busts weaves a relationship of both disgusted retraction and keen attraction in the work. In Julie Lavinge’s analysis of the work in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, it is referred to as therefore an erotic piece because of this.

In addition, it should be of note that these materials both possess an identifiable pleasant smell, which gives the work a polysensorial element, thus fuelling the notion of intimacy and the