Journal

What Treasure The Erotic actually was

Seven of the series on this site carry the line “from Treasure The Erotic” and none of them explain it. It was a collaboration, and the structure of it was the idea.

Colin Burn founded it — a jewellery artist who works in platinum, gold and diamonds and had grown tired of the fact that extraordinary craft is acceptable everywhere except the erotic. Nicole Barnes co-founded it as conceptual and performance artist. I came in as visual artist and creative director.

The sanctums

Rather than a themed group show, we built rooms. Each one a sanctum with its own argument — an altar, a palazzo, an oubliette, a crypt, a vivarium, a shrine, a chamber, a temple, a sanctuary, an oratory. Each held a Burn sculpture and a photographic series of mine, made to the same idea from opposite directions: an object you could hold, and a picture you could not.

That pairing is what made it work. A sculpture states a position. A photograph puts a person inside it. Standing between the two, an audience had nowhere comfortable to file what they were looking at.

What it was arguing

The line we used was “a laud to pleasure, honouring and valuing the erotic” — and value is the operative word. Not shock, not titillation. The question of what a society is prepared to treat as worthy of craft, of permanence, of a room of its own.

You can watch people work that out in real time in front of the Pearl Royale. Platinum, seventy carats, an edition of three, and they will discuss every one of those facts before they will discuss what it is for.

Who made it

Not a small list, and that matters, because none of this was made alone. From the exhibition's own credits: Nadia Duca and Alistair Arkwright on special effects makeup, Jessica Walker on taxidermy and needle artistry, Alex Gerrard, Marijke Loosjes, Haylee Cee and Erica Giancola as fine art models and performers, with Erica Giancola, Brooke Mountford, Craig Long and Justin Burman through curation and production.

The models are collaborators in this, not subjects. Several of the works exist because someone was willing to hold a position for a long time while a needle artist or a taxidermist worked on them.

What happened to it

It exhibited in Perth and Los Angeles. It took two Honourable Mentions at the International Photography Awards in 2019, in Fine Art–Nudes and Fine Art–Other. Penthouse ran a twelve-page feature in the March/April 2021 issue.

Twelve pages is unusual. Magazines give twelve pages to things they think their readers have not seen before.