Drawing with your wee

I was half asleep in bed and I had a sudden remembered image of making marks in the snow with my wee when a boy. I still remembered the yellow tinge the lines made in the snow and how excited I was. I felt again the cold on my bare legs and saw clearly the bits of twig that poked through the light coating of fresh snow. How it had been retrieved and where that memory had been hiding all those years I don't know, but something chemical or electrical must have had its buttons pressed. Perhaps my old man's need to go to the toilet had sent a message from my bladder and a route had been found to my brain. Boys in particular like to make marks with their wee in snow, its a very gendered way of drawing.

Not long ago Helen Chadwick's work was on show at the Hepworth in Wakefield. Her 'Piss Flowers' installation was I thought still a wonderful piece of work. It turns what could be just a gender issue into something transcendent. The exhibition at the Hepworth was entitled 'Life Pleasures' and weeing can be exactly that, a simple basic pleasure. Her Piss Flowers are also a feminist comment on how easy it is for boys to wee in the snow and perhaps because they take it for granted that it is something they can do, she can make her point much more succinctly and with a good dose of humour. It's as if she was saying, "Men never make the most out of what comes too easy." 

The installation consists of twelve white-enamelled bronze flower like forms. The shapes had been initially cast in plaster from the negative forms left by the artist and her partner, David Notarius, after urinating into deep snow in Canada. The casts invert the space so that they then resemble flowers. The gender twist was created as they took turns urinating, Chadwick’s wee was the more centralised and was vertical, while her partner's was more scattered, forming what eventually became the outer petals of the flower like forms. For the art theorists who would then write about the work, this inverts gender roles, creating a "phallic" pistil from the female's urine and "petals" from the male's. I am though simply reminded of the joy of weeing in company and see these sculptures as a beautiful evocation of love. 

Helen Chadwick: Piss Flowers: 1991-92

A close up of Piss Flowers

See also:

Drawing as material thinking

Drawing as a model for life experience

A history of drawing as thinking

Stains and blots: Blood sweat and tears