New artwork text! This story is about Shirley Cameron’s performance Washing the Twins held in a sculpture park in Portugal in 1977.
Cameron invited her friend the writer Angela Carter to take part in the performance. Carter washed an existing sculpture of a boy and girl while Cameron washed her own twins. They dried the sculpture and the twins with a towel and dressed them up in clothes. The audience loved it.
For the sculpture park director, the performance constituted a form of destruction, desecrating both the original sculpture and the rules of public art. But perhaps it’s more interesting to view it as destruction as radical activism; one artist taking on the work of another artist in order to critique social constructs and forge a link between the fight for free childcare and equal pay to the systematic exclusion of women from the art world.
Photographs: Shirley Cameron, Washing the Twins, 1977, International Art Encounters in Portugal, Parque Dom Carlos I, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Courtesy Shirley Cameron.