Jo Spence: Libido Uprising

Photo therapy, as developed by Jo SPENCE in collaboration with Rosy MARTIN, offers ways of making visible repressed memories, conflicts, fantasies, traumas, desires and losses. It is the visual manifestation of self-interrogation, facilitated by the photo-therapeutic exchange. 

 

In their collaborative series Libido Uprising, Spence and Martin examine the relationship between mother and daughter. The work focuses on Jo’s vision of a 1950s working class, domesticated housewife, seen from the eyes of a young woman in the 1980s who is exploring her sexual freedom. The series complicates the archetypal woman, one juggling multiple jobs with household chores, whilst maintaining her identity as an independent and sexualised being. The work captures the conflict between the domestic and the erotic and how they co-exist. Rather than a rejection of the mother figure, the series evokes a sense of understanding, acceptance and intergenerational comradery around the socially imposed strictures of womanhood.

Jo Spence (1934–1992) began her career as a commercial photographer, specialising in family portraits and wedding photos. She pushed the medium beyond this narrow subject matter to explore its political function, challenging the social and structural barriers working against female artists of the time. Spence later used photo therapy as a tool to help her process her own fight with breast cancer by depicting various stages of the disease and its effects on her body in order to subvert the notion of an idealised female form. Works from this series are currently featured as part of the exhibition 'Misbehaving Bodies' at the Wellcome Collection in London.