guilt-free
Lily Bunney
6-22 April 2024
304 Seven Sisters Road, N4 2AG
exhibition open by appointment
The works in the “guilt-free” display mark a beginning of a body of work exploring the idea of morality in girlhood, femininity and trauma.
The title itself acts as the opposite of a disclaimer, opposing the guilt inherent to the girly experience and the subsequent instinct to apologise, disclaim, cover oneself with the benefit of the doubt. In an interview promoting her book Down the Drain, Julia Fox speaks of the feminine urge to start sentences with “I think” or “I feel” – in a performance of naivete, we emphasise that the feminine perception is gullible rather than stating the obvious.
When we acknowledge something is guilt-free, we also acknowledge guilt exists in that space. As a marketing cliché, it aims to inflict shame and offer an alternative, co-opting empowerment, encouraging us to take control over actions of which we are expected to feel guilty. Lily’s work promotes this socially constructed moral deviance.
More Girls Peeing Outside on Cars is the third painting in the Girls Peeing on Cars series which spans large-scale pointillist paintings and short stories. The series looks into navigating urban space and community-building acts between women and queers, especially in the context of nightlife and its threats. The act of peeing publicly defiles, desecrates the sanitised, gentrified space, while exposing oneself and the private requires a community shield. The girlies form a circle as a warm stream of piss covers the shiny cars and we laugh in necessity and profanity.
The everyone is beautiful, no one is horny pentaptych extrapolates the feeling of shame and exposure from Girls Peeing on Cars, carrying it into the digital to examine further acts of naughtiness and the grotesque. Inspired by an exploration of body horror and transfiguration, Lily paints a soft-core porn close-up frame depicting an act of domination and transforms into a yawning cat – its silly little innocent face concealing the profane.
For the last piece of the display, Lily looks to Jennette McCurdy and her recently published memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, delving into the consumption of celebrity trauma online. Composed of two separate pieces of canvas joined, the painting combines the torso of the writer with an image of a cat as her crotch.
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