The enduring transgression of Sophy Rickett’s infamous ‘Pissing Women’

“We looked relatively sober and in control,” observes the photographer Sophy Rickett, characterising the protagonists in Pissing Women. Conceived in 1994 and first exhibited in 1995, the original triptych features young women rejecting the typical, after-dark-behind-a-car-squat. Instead they are standing, knees slightly bent, urinating on the architecture of corporate London. ​“One of the things that felt transgressive was that we were wearing business attire,” she continues. ​“It wouldn’t have worked if we’d adopted the ​‘ladette’ demeanour, that would have aligned too closely with a cultural meme already resisting gendered codes. My form of resistance was to appear outwardly part of the system, while doing this one thing differently.”

Indeed, the pictures’ sartorial markers are fundamental to their confronting appearance and subversive quality. The three women, pictured individually, adopt a uniform of office appropriate garb (or ​‘corporate drag’, as the art critic Hettie Judah labels it): smart skirt suits, straight silhouettes, and heeled loafers or Mary Janes. One figure even wears a poppy on her lapel. In an earlier test shoot, Rickett swapped out her more respectable footwear to trial open-toed denim wedges, noticing a discernable tone shift between the images. 

Originally comprised of just three photographs – Vauxhall Bridge, Silvertown, Old Street – in 2023, Isabella Burley’s Climax Books revisited the series, publishing an expanded monograph that quickly sold out. More recently the work has been exhibited with Cob Gallery, first in London (alongside images from her friend, the photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg) and currently in Paris in a collaboration with Vie Projects (through December 1). 

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Additionally, Rickett worked closely with editors Labeja Kodua Okullu and Darren Biabowe Barnes to release a new anthology, published by Cheerio. It marks the 30^th anniversary of Pissing Women, with this latest iteration built around its subsequent dialogue, featuring essays and interviews produced in response to the images from contemporary figures including Judah, St. Vincent, Eileen Myles, Sophie Duker and Juno Calypso.

“It’s almost impossible for me to see them objectively, I almost can’t look at them,” the photographer says on a Zoom call, relaying her relationship with the work today. ​“I’m really proud of them, but at this point I understand them better through other people’s responses. When Isabella approached me, I was torn. Did I really want to go back there? But she was right, and it was amazing how it introduced the work to a new generation. The Cheerio publication, too, was an opportunity to connect with new people while acknowledging that it’s part of my history, my backstory.” 

An accessible creative outlet during a stint temping at the Financial Times (Rickett’s job was to administer the dispatch of CD-Roms), Pissing Women was primarily informed by her proximity to the patriarchal landscape of one of London’s business districts. ​“To begin with I dismissed the [office] environment as boring and not relevant to me, before realising that actually this is really interesting as a place,” she shares. ​“I began to recognise the politics, culture, aesthetics, language, and all the structures embedded within that environment – what’s considered ​‘normal’ and how behaviour is culturally coded through gender, reflecting on how women operate within these spaces, and how we might reimagine our behaviour differently.”

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While studying for her BA at what is now London College of Communications, a few years earlier Rickett had been privy to discussions about the way artists could be subversive or disruptive in their practices, and moreover, whether such gestures were more effective from the outside or within; her job at the FT gave her ample room to explore an approach. ​“It put me in this amazing position – I could observe and learn the culture in a nuanced way,” she explains. ​“It was about satisfying the ongoing sense of wanting to make work too – to be an artist – and in a way, it was the only way I could, because I was literally there 9‑to‑5 every day.”

Long invested in the role environments play in shaping politics, society and culture, that the images were staged in urban sites marrying the public domain with important systems of capitalism – MI6 being closely linked with intelligence, Old Street to the business districts of the City of London, and Silvertown to its satellites – was another significant component. ​“I’ve always been interested in how we are conditioned by environments and how, in that way, environments are a form of language. Pissing Women was exploring this through gender, and in the context of the city, the economy, and corporate life,” offers Rickett. ​“Symbolically, [these places] were pillars of capitalist infrastructure; security, money and communication.”

A kind of bold announcement, the Pissing Women moniker, which the photographer recognises can take on the properties of a verb or an adjective, depending on one’s perspective (the former however, is more favourable and largely true to its genesis), was a less considered event notes Rickett. ​“It sort of attached itself; I don’t remember exactly how or when, and I’m still quite ambivalent about it,” she reflects. ​“The strength really lies in the images, so to me, Pissing Women feels more like a label than a title. But at this point I have to own it, changing it now might close it down too much.”

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Having arrived close to the tail end of 18 years of consecutive Tory governments – almost on the cusp of New Labour’s landslide win, and the phenomenon of the ladette that subsequently accompanied it (a subculture the series is typically positioned alongside) – Pissing Women has gone on to become a seminal work, embraced (and challenged) by audiences now for thirty years. Some, like those whose words appear in the Cheerio publication, have woven their own narratives onto it, while others have inadvertently highlighted the gender politics that frame it.

“It was a big thing in porn chat rooms for a while, which really surprised me at the time,” shares Rickett, recalling the series’ appropriation online. ​“It shows that once you put something into the world, you have no control over how it’s received. People see what they’re compelled to see, which is, in a way, an analogy for many things: like how women are perceived and understood.”

Pissing Women by Sophy Rickett is published by Cheerio. It was on view at London’s Cob Gallery in September and runs until December 1 in Paris at Vie Projects.

Zoe Whitfield is a freelance arts and photography writer. Follow her on Instagram.

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