56:65 [The Sex Pictures]

Ellen Mara de Wachter:

“Very briefly, myself and the artist Nick Berkeley met when I was 56 and he was 65. We
decided to document the wild abandon which ensued.”
—Anna

If the Sex Pictures are unusual, it is not so much due to their explicit nature or the age of the
participants, but rather, it is in their apparent detachment from expected behaviours and
surrender to the unknown. By dropping the cover of mundane activities – what do you do
with a day? – they convey states of freedom that flourish in the imagination, acting them
out with bodies in ways that welcome ambiguity and hint at possibilities of transcendence.
For Nick, some of this freedom is afforded by his identity. He says, ‘my age, gender and skin
colour disbar me from being of interest, which is a liberation.’

On one occasion, what he wants is to lie down, bare skin rasping the concrete drive next to
a dilapidated barn. The topography of his body is illuminated by milky rays of sun, gently
caressed by the air. The impetus for the behaviour is uncertain: does the pose betray a state
of exhaustion, or is it a sign of inception?

For Anna, the process of creating these images was liberating in a different way, akin to
‘getting away from yourself, going towards being nothing.’

Both artists have previously explored the realms of erotic feeling and action in their art;
Anna in a group of drawings from the mid-1980s, gathered under the title Pleasures and
nightmares, mingled and drawn, and Nick in a series of portraits of women orgasming,
created in the 1990s from Super 8 film stills. The work in this book is rooted in those
projects, and evidences ‘a flowering of that shared impulse’, says Nick, but ‘done in a way
that involved us agreeing that all bets were off.’

To amplify the sense of liberation that arose as they created these pictures, Anna and Nick
thought of the images as being ‘post-verbal’, meaning that rather than needing to be
interpreted via ideas and words, they could articulate themselves in the language of the
visual.

But their effects are not limited to the visual sense. They also transmit their expressiveness
in tactile terms we can actually feel. Did your mirror neurons fire when you saw bare skin
meet concrete, to cause a twinge in your own flank, as though you, too, were laid down on a
harsh surface? The pictures affect our aesthetic sense, a faculty that has been grossly
mystified by the arcana of academia, but which just means that we feel beauty in our flesh
and bones, not somewhere ‘out there’. If the articulation of sensorial languages sometimes
feels stilted, it may be because it is actually asking to be brought back into the conversation,
especially since, according to Anna and Nick, ‘the realm of the senses doesn’t fade away as
you get old. All of that stuff is still on fire.’

For the briefest of moments, the shutter closes on a small part of the world. A scene’s
meanings are suspended like spores on the breeze. As we look at the resulting picture, we
are subtly transformed. The image burrows into us, nourishing itself with memories and associations:

smells, sounds, flavours and textures. It roots itself in our imagination, from
where it might germinate into a story.

One such story involves the vulva as a sign in a picture, sometimes painted, sometimes
photographed. It’s a familiar tale: a naked woman lies back while a man observes and
elevates her nakedness into artful nudity. This yields further narratives, about the dynamics
of power, passivity, and creativity in the relationship. Looking at such a picture, we are often
encouraged to trace the trajectory of a unilateral gaze onto the image. But when Nick
photographs Anna as she sits on a horse, and he looks at her, and she looks into the
distance, and the mirror she holds up reflects pure light, what web of desire do their gazes
weave across the picture?

Perhaps, Anna wonders, ‘in all those historical images where men artists are looking at
women ‘muses’, there would have been a lot of shared pleasure in the process.’
The web weaves itself more intricately still when the body of the earth, with its rich humus
and abundant vegetation, becomes a third in the relationship. It scatters itself onto their
skin, sucks their bodies into a muddy pool, where they kiss the ground and moon the sky in
an act of terrestrial worship. The surrounding forest provides an erotic garden and
companion, inspiring lust and licence.

Some of the images Anna and Nick took as they abandoned themselves to their wilderness
have a directness that the artists recognise makes them ‘difficult to look at’. Not those
featuring a speculum, a blue latex glove, or a card depicting an aerial bomber dropping its
payload – disconcerting elements that coax the imagination down unfamiliar paths. But the
close-ups of sensitive parts: faces, fingers and openings, where blood runs close to the skin
or coats its surface, or where the folds around the eyes and mucous membranes are
exposed in all their delicacy.

Anna used these images as source material for a series of watercolour paintings, which are
not always so easy to look at either, but which entice the mind’s eye and offer a retreat
from a world oversaturated with photography. Generated by a hand that stroked the paper
with a brush loaded with liquid pigment, these paintings are touched, and also touching.
And although watercolour is more readily associated with genteel depictions of wilderness
than close-cropped images of sexual acts, the medium’s sensuality is undeniable. Amid this
collection of experimental pictures, its fluidity transports the imagination into the
generative, life-affirming realm of the erotic.