review: Olivia Sterling & Lydia Pettit at guts gallery

text beth mckenzie

A nude woman with animalistic features such as claws and extended limbs, posed on the ground with a dark background and red lighting.

Lydia Pettit, Dog Woman (After Rego), 2024. Oil on canvas. Rights reserved to the artist and Guts Gallery.

Female sexuality has always been a sore spot for visual culture. As both victim and villain, women regularly find themselves depicted in a monstrous light on account of their unruly sexual urges. In an appropriately horror-filled exhibition ahead of the Halloween season, Guts Gallery explores this trend head on. As the name suggests, Bitches in Heat sees artists Olivia Sterling and Lydia Pettit confront viewers with female sexuality in a way that bears few apologies.

Person viewing a colorful painting of a box filled with various cartoon-like items, including a rat, cookie, fish, bone, and objects, with a pink background and exaggerated hands pointing into the box.

Olivia Sterling, Things of the Mind, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. Rights reserved to the artist and Guts Gallery.

A painting of a woman with dark skin wearing a purple top, looking into a mirror with her hands pressed against the glass. The woman's reflection shows only her face and chest. Below, a white fluffy dog is lying on the floor, with a blue and green leash attached to its collar, in front of a red brick wall.

Olivia Sterling, And Her Warm Chest is a Sweet Grave, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. Rights reserved to the artist and Guts Gallery.

Perhaps the more tame of the two, Sterling equates desire to gluttony in her work. Greedy pink hands poke around in chocolate boxes, a biscuit taunts “Eat Me” in delectable pastel lettering, and crude Jammy Dodger nipples perk up from behind a window. Her palette is bright and playful, teasing and tempting you to indulge; to give in to all-consuming desire. Consistent with the show’s accompanying text by Irish comedian Alison Spittle, Sterling resists the notion that the desires of plus-size women - and those who desire them - are unnatural. For her, carnal desire is an appetite like any other, subject to the individual and not subject to shame.

A painting depicts a nude woman with tattoos, leaning through a window frame with red background panels. Her right hand, adorned with rings and long black nails, holds the frame. Behind the window, a dark silhouette of a figure with glowing red eyes and long hair is visible, with one hand reaching out toward the woman. The overall mood is dark and mysterious.

Lydia Pettit, Entry Points, 2024. Oil on canvas. Rights reserved to the artist and Guts Gallery.

Pettit’s work draws more on horror iconography. In her crazed self-portraits of carnal desire, the artist pokes fun at our culture’s irrational fear of female sexuality. Claws wielded, mouth foaming like a rabid dog, Pettit’s berserk alter ego is equal parts menacing and insatiable. In her emphasis on her body, the artist contributes to a long tradition of women in the horror genre. Think Carrie, Jennifer Check of Jennifer’s Body, or even Demi Moore’s twisted TV personality in the 2024 release The Substance. Pettit’s work projects our baseless anxieties about female desire onto the canvas, transforming herself into the kind of figure who actually warrants such a reaction.

A wooden circular platform with a chained hand sculpture, featuring long black claws, emerging from beneath a wooden hatch in the center of the platform.

Lydia Pettit, Will you Keep me Here Forever?, 2024. Mixed media. Rights reserved to the artist and Guts Gallery.

Fun aside, Bitches in Heat also alludes to the more harmful aspects of our cultural inclination to shame women’s desires. In an accompanying zine, consisting of paintings, sketches and correspondence between the artists during the making of the show, a Whatsapp message written by Pettit reads: “so my dog is really my fear of what might happen when I finally let my sexuality in. Can I control it? Will it change me? Will I lose myself?” Here is where the true horror lies. Should we continue to banish female sexuality, particularly that of plus-size women, to the halls of shame and ridicule, we only increase the myth that causes so many women to retreat from their libidinal impulses. Bitches in Heat asserts that, whilst desire may make fools of us all, the real fools are those who refuse to give in.

Published 15th October 2024.