“Right from the very beginning, I wanted to examine how it feels, to explain what it is to be a woman,” says Nancy Honey. As a latest exhibition of her works at London bookshops Claire de Rouen’s new Shoreditch area involves an finish, it’s a becoming time for the American-born, London-based artist to look again on her profession. “I’m 78 years old now, which is mind-blowing, and I just think, ‘how did I get here so fast, and what does it mean to look back?’”
The exhibition, particularly curated for Claire de Rouen by the store’s new co-director Dominic Bell, attracts upon Honey’s many photographic sequence, all of which share a equally hopeful perspective on womanhood. She says, “It’s a freeing up of a space of female experience, and I hope it shows a certain sense of enjoyment.” That joyous high quality runs all through Honey’s work, which paperwork girls’s experiences at numerous levels of life: sequence comparable to Entering the Masquerade (1992) and A Daughter’s View (1991), for instance, seize the transition from childhood to maturity with tenderness, wealthy colors and a form of hazy, nostalgic glow. There is pleasure in these pictures, however Honey does not shrink back from capturing the anxieties of adolescence too: a few of her topics are laughing and goofing round; others seem bored, pensive and even disgusted.
“I always wanted to make work that was not didactic, but that explains what it feels like to be a woman. [I didn’t want to be] negative and not be hard-hitting – especially during a time when other photographers were,” Honey explains. The result’s a physique of labor that explores altering feminine lives with a way of curiosity, at occasions bodily estrangement (one shot from Entering the Masquerade reveals a lady in a classroom frowning as she friends, lifts up her shirt and friends down at her personal physique), and, at its very centre, the notion of playfulness. Clothes, make-up, and sneakers change into a costume rehearsal for maturity, and we see younger girls flicker between states of play and solemnity.
An identical in-betweenness is current in Honey’s close-ups, too, which regularly seize the softness of a younger woman’s face starting to provide method to the extra pronounced bone construction of an grownup. “As a photographer of women, I am deeply fascinated by how our faces change so quickly,” Honey explains. “You see a teenage or childlike face, and then you see them maybe a year or two later, and think, ‘Oh my God, they look so different!’”
As the artist remembers, she has at occasions acquired criticism for portraying womanhood and femininity with such a lightweight contact, with some critics suggesting that her work lacks gravitas. “I remember I was showing the work as a slide presentation and one woman just either shouted out or put up her hand and said, ‘Don’t you think this is very marshmallowy?’” But whereas she could imbue her work with humour and heat, that doesn’t imply she ignores bigger, extra critical issues of the feminine physique as a commodity in a patriarchal and capitalist society. “One of my big questions is: what would it be like if we as women were ruling the world? And why is it that a picture of a beautiful young lady, teenager or early 20s, is always there to sell something? What do we do about that? Do we censor ourselves, or do we just say, ‘What the hell?’”
Honey’s pictures possess each a what-the-hell perspective and an insistence that, regardless of the difficulties, current in a feminine physique can not less than generally be skilled and documented with a sure lightness. As she places it, “Even though I feel like I have a lot of joie de vivre, I still think I’m talking about serious things. Joy is serious.”
Claire de Rouen’s new store is now open at 11A Kingsland Road, London and their excellent cultural programming continues with extra exhibitions deliberate to have fun 2026, their twentieth anniversary 12 months.
