‘Sex on canvas is art, not pornography’

By Andrew Mulenga

Pictorial painting can take up many forms in terms of subject matter, a tranquil landscape in a rural setting, an animated cultural ceremony, a portrait or even the charming still-life of a flower arrangement.

But imagine a painting filled with realistically rendered genitalia, strewn all over the canvas, female and male, gaping and jutting respectively, all framed in the glistening ambience of a pulsating orgy. This is what you expect to see in the easier seen than described works such as Forbidden Fruit by British painter Ruth Bircham.

In fact, it is during moments like this that one hopes to seek refuge in such words like those attributed to the German painter Gerhard Richter:  “To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing -- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.”

The Kiss (acrylic on canvas) by Ruth Bircham

Bircham’s most uninhibited work, which falls into a genre called ‘erotic art’, cannot be printed along with this article because in the eyes of many it will be perceived as pornography. But calling her work pornography is an accusation she strongly refutes and proficiently defends with deeply meditated ideas.

Moreover, she has already embarked on a campaign to spread her erotic gospel outside the UK having successfully exhibited at Terra Kulture gallery on Victoria Island, in Nigeria in 2009 alongside two Nigerian artists as well as Brussels, Belgium in September last year. At both venues she says she received stimulating press interviews and the shocked, but enthusiastic audiences loved her art filling the galleries in streams every day.

“My art is intended for the masses globally, as my intention is to tour to create the awareness of diverse beauty that shows the nude or naked form in its natural beauty as aesthetic,” she explains.

By general community standards of course, sexual acts are perceived to be meant for the private 

domain so their public presence or exhibition may tend to solicit intense debate hinging on what constitutes ‘public morality’. Bircham however insists that when the sexual act or nude form is created via art as representative, it becomes a powerful voice, and has a ‘Will’ of its own that speaks out against what is based on negative or positive morality, and one must ask oneself, whose views are these moralities based on?

“Sex on canvas, in sculpture, photography, drawing and dance is art and should be seen as art, not pornography. When it’s in the gallery it is art. Pornography is when you are situated in the same room with the actual persons having sex in front of you or when something is filmed without editing the footage clips, and is sold, something that depicts on-going action of sex without stopping,” she explains, clarifying that because it is created by an artist, it is art, also it is presented in a gallery for exhibition.

Lust (oil and acrylic on canvas)

by Ruth Bircham

She has received many confrontational views from the public, in which she asks, “what is the real” and “what is the extreme?” Is not the extreme what is deemed how the female body should be portrayed. She argues that what is reflected in art is how the uses of the nude, naked or sexual body as a means of expression plays an important part in addressing issues that women in the contemporary world face.

“This type of artwork stands in opposition to recognised social representations of women in the media such as magazines, television, books, newspapers and other media products, like advertisements,” she says.

She emphasises that her art is for adults only, and at every exhibition, she has warning signs against anyone below the age of 21, and in galleries her provocative works usually get a private room to themselves.

She divides her adult themed art into two categories, “sensual erotic” and “explicit erotic”, one being more watered-down than the other, the former probably being the type published with this article.

“Sensual erotic is artworks which are naturally suggestive and just nude. It is indicative or evocative, making someone thinks of sexual matters. It is titillating, provocative, and stimulates further thoughts that convey a hint or suggestion, a promise of a great time,” she elaborates “Explicit erotic is artworks which pulls the viewer into the image to question its existence, style, methods its beauty from a diverse form. It is enticing, inviting the viewer’s attention. What makes it explicit is when the body sections are framed specifically”.

Recently, Bircham has been applying her remarkable skill for realistically depicting female genitalia to the fight against female circumcision otherwise known as Female Genital Cutting (FGC). She intends to host an exhibition that will have a segment with paintings whose proceeds are marked for donation to the Orchid Project an organisation that advocates against FGC, a culture that is practiced among a good number of societies across the world although Indonesia, Africa and the Middle East have been reported as having the most prevalent cases.  

Three Graceful Bathers by Ruth Bircham

According to the Orchid Project, the UN estimates that worldwide, 125 million women and girls are currently living with the consequences of FGC and a further 30 million girls are at risk of being cut in the next decade across 29 known countries.

“The age at which a girl is cut depends on a specific cultural context. In some communities a girl may be just nine days old. In others, it may be later as a teenager. In half of the countries that practice FGC, the majority of girls are cut before age five,” reports the Orchid Project. According to the organisation, men and women often support FGC without question because it is a traditional practice that has existed in a community for generations. Many communities believe that a girl needs to be cut in order to marry well.

Bircham is riled by such cultural practices and describes them as false ideals that need to be questioned.

“FGC is an act to make women submissive, isolated, invisible and subjective to being. I’m objective and will continue to be objective against all things that demonstrate that the female should be thus,” argues the painter.

But returning to her work, one must not be fooled by her explicit content and be quick to judge her. As earlier alluded, her paintings are rooted in thought out concepts and theory, and its purpose is to challenge perceptions. She believes, everyone is naked and therefore uses the naked form to “invite and enrich people to really look at what they are really looking at within themselves; it’s almost like a mirror reflection.”

“The main issue is found in what statements I am implying, incorporating and encouraging in my artworks when I a female turn a situation into a subjective or objective experience, and the diverse meaning and concepts that lay behind them,” she says.

Perhaps it is true that the audience’s perceptions may not always meet the terms of an artist’s expression, particularly when it comes to the portrayal of nudity although this entirely depends on the community or the space at which the art is being displayed. East Africa is fairly tolerant in this regard with Uganda hosting the annual Nude exhibition since 2000. Kenya too had a major exhibition with Nude Naked Nature held at the Italian Cultural Centre in Nairobi last year that featured 20 artists from five countries which included Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Kenya.It featured drawings, paintings, sculpture, installation and photography and was announced as “a contemplation of the human body in contemporary Pan-African art practice.”

Closer to home, in 2001, Nsofwa Bowa, subsequently well-known but then a young Zambian sculptor eager to launch his career, made a series of concrete statues of females which he installed around the lawns of a roundabout in Ndola, with city council approval. Nude from the waist up, the figures caused a controversy which resulted in a demand by women’s lobby groups for their demolition on the alleged reason of their vulgarity. Nsofwa made an attempt to “dress” the statues by making alterations but still, they were destroyed at night by unknown people barely a week after they were erected.

Nevertheless, returning to Bircham, although the erotic assumes a substantial component of her art production, her themes are broad, ranging from conventional portraits, surrealist landscapes as well as wildlife and nature.

Although the 48 year old is of Caribbean heritage having been raised in both Jamaica and England, and has only visited the continent once, her work appears to have an inherently African visual impression to it. Evident in works such as Wash Day that depicts a typical scene of rural women doing their laundry by the river or Cry For Biafra an ode to the brutal Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-1970 that also speaks to modern times and according to the artist “questions the logics and theories that lays behind the methods used to destroy lives, and why Boko Haram should be allowed to commit serious crimes” in obvious reference to the recent kidnaping of over 200 Nigerian school girls by insurgents.

Bircham holds a Diploma in Art and Design from Camberwell Art College in London as well as a BA (Hon) In Fine Art Combined Media at Croydon College although she insists that she is a self-taught artist.