The use of film is a departure for this artist who is better known for her installations: seemingly unstructured arrangements of furniture and humble objects, found or made, through which the viewer must navigate unaided. In her first film, Most Women Never Experience, Wilkes employs similar de-centring tactics. A choppy succession of images is presented “as found”: a staccato of highly personal moments, apparently unedited, plucked fresh from the everyday. Lacking a unifying narrative or frame of reference, they seem to comprise a random and disjointed sampling from the consciousness of a complete unknown. Like Wilkes’ installations, her film resists easy categorization. Both are fully open to interpretation, raising infinite discursive possibilities.

The film is barely seven minutes long, offering a disjuncture of often repetitive images without sound, or sound without images. It starts with an empty screen, background conversation barely audible over loud, discordant music. Scenes then jump around inexplicably in what appears to be the same modest terraced house, shifting from one small domestic space to another. On the landing of a tight stairwell a half-dressed toddler shifts his weight and points anxiously while the naked pelvis of a woman is seen, from toddler eye-level, walking by. The scene is reprised: this time a young woman scoops up the sexless toddler. Other scenes follow in no clear order: a different woman, heavily pregnant and unclothed, reclining as she gulps water thirstily, getting up to turn on a television, smoothing the sheets of her bed. Soft indirect light filters in from the window. She addresses the camera, drawing us into the intimate scene, but at this moment the sound is cut and her words and the possibility for engagement are stymied. Cut: she is walking down the corridor of her home, the phone is ringing. Sound is erased yet again as she speaks on the phone, thwarting our efforts to understand her. As she walks by her swollen belly is captured and held in a convex mirror, exaggerated, cartoon-like. At some point she piles up dishes, they clatter noisily and she laughs, but again all sound is lost and we are unable to share in the moment. The film offers up a blunt portrayal of an intimate yet utterly mundane slice of life characterized by a frustrating lack of closure.

The film also highlights the ordinary and yet inexplicable business of life itself, capturing the body’s direct exchanges with the inanimate objects that share our world: a sheet to be straightened, a rusty and wet window grill to be gazed through, a bottle of water to be pressed to the lips, a needy toddler to be scooped up and carried down a steep stairway, dishes that clatter when cleared away. Tactile, visceral and unassuming moments that are usually overlooked; intimate moments no less significant for being hidden away in the private sphere or in consciousness.

If at first glance this film appears unstudied and un-didactic, its title, Most Women Never Experience, is quite another matter. Decidedly provocative, the title posits an essentialist view of a woman-subject as fixed and definable, echoing early feminist art by women who claimed to speak for ‘Woman’ as a whole, as if women all thought in the same mind, and shared the same experience. But the piece itself in fact contradicts this universalizing assumption, presenting a fractured and de-centred identity that is impossible to pin down. Unlike early essentialist art which fore-grounded female subjectivity as essentially knowable, this work presents an indeterminate subject who fluctuates according to her changing physiology and shifting surroundings. Contrary to the generalisation implied by the title, Wilkes understands that the notion ‘Woman’ is not a solid and monolithic ground in need of consolidation, but rather an unstable premise in need of dis-articulation.

Thus in this piece, Wilkes problematises sequence and flow, pat narrative, theoretical discourse and the representation of the female body, which features prominently and changes identity and form throughout. We are confronted with the bare female figure, unadorned and vulnerable, engaged in everyday activities, represented in different physical incarnations, sometimes pregnant, sometimes maternal, sometimes neither. The distorted image of the swollen pregnant belly captured in the convex mirror is indicative of a deeper layer of meaning, indexing the game of reflections at play in post-modern art and contemporary theories on the subject of identity and gender, especially Lacan’s ideas on the mirror-phase as formative of such. It also raises the problem of one’s shifting identity during the strange and unfamiliar period of gestation and early motherhood, de-naturalising this process which rarely feels natural to most women, but more often is experienced as a distortion of one’s own true self.

Wilkes became a mother shortly before making this portrayal and clearly draws on her own experience. Her scenes of intimate everyday interaction between mother and baby raise the continuing work on this topic by the artist Mary Kelly, as well the psychoanalytical writings of Freud and Lacan that influenced and inspired it. Mary Kelly, like many other contemporary women artists, consistently refuses to put the figure of the woman-mother on view, seemingly unwilling to encumber an overburdened cultural sphere with yet another reductive representation of woman. Wary of creating images that might too easily be subsumed in patriarchal discourse, other contemporary women artists have resorted to irony, appropriation or other deconstructive ploys when depicting the female. Very few are brave enough to engage with the nude directly. Cathy Wilkes succeeds in foregrounding the female body in a frame that is neither essentialising, nor reductive in its conception. It is a radical gesture that sets her apart from most of her contemporaries.

In Cathy Wilkes’ work, subjectivity itself is revealed, like the immediate experience we derive from our bodies, to be fleeting, irreducible. And like her subject matter, her work defeats closure, raising more questions than it has answers for. Perhaps it is not surprising that Wilkes places herself at the margins of the contemporary art world, eschewing more established commercial art centres to live and work in her native Scotland. A true original, she bravely tackles critical, personal and political issues, and does so in defiance of convention, eschewing obvious idioms. Positioning herself outside established critical frameworks and prescribed ideologies, she challenges us to make up our own mind in confronting problematic subject matter and inspires us to create our own peripheral paths of resistance.