IN THE COMPANY OF PESTS is a set of mixed media woodblock and screenprint images expressing frustration at the level of sexual agency granted to women as the subjects of art. Birds appear throughout the works as a metaphor for unwanted sexual advances or expectation. They are the pests.
The works reframe motifs and themes from existing artworks and stories being Giovanni Segatini’s ‘A Mermaid Being Mobbed by Seagulls’, 1858 – 1899, and the Greek Myth of ‘Leda and the Swan’. The name of the set itself is an adaption of “The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter, in which the classic Little Red Riding Hood tale is adapted so that Little Red ‘tames’ the Big Bad Wolf. The works are ultimately about flipping the narratives in these classic titles to grant their subject more sexual agency.
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