Books
Visual Pleasure brings together artwork and research completed over the past 4 years by artist Dawn Woolley including documentation from a series of performance installations, Cut to the Measure of Desire, which were specially commissioned in 2009 by Stiwdio Safle and funded by the Arts Council of Wales.
Woolley’s artwork forms an enquiry into the act of looking and being looked at. Referring to psychoanalysis, phenomenology and feminism she examines her experience of being an object of sight and also considers the experience the viewer has when looking at her as a female, and as a photographic object. Voyeurism and exhibitionism intertwine in purposefully provocative scenes.
Visual Pleasure includes a critical essay by Woolley that takes modes of looking and spectatorship as its subject.
The text considers the psychology of perception and illusion in art referring to seminal texts by Laura Mulvey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Micheal Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Also included is an introductory text by the writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader.
The publication was made possible through a production grant by the Arts Council of Wales and is published through Ffotogallery.
