At first glance, the imagery in Cornelie Tollens’ work appears gaudily glamorous and seems to verge on the pornographic. The highly fetishised shots of beautiful, naked young women, their sexual organs barely obscured by lacy lingerie, convey a visceral immediacy at times reminiscent of fashion photography. However, these defiantly polemical compositions employ a version of the perfect female body in order to discredit it and thereby reclaim popular representations of women’s sexuality: one image, for instance, depicts a pig’s heart in a mesh g-string. The work engages with the symbols of our male-dominated — what feminism calls phallocentric — culture. It exploits and re-evaluates images which reduce female models to sexual function and anatomical fact, thereby affirming the female body as a site of selfhood and experience. Tollens subverts motifs and symbols drawn from both mythology and popular culture, presenting woman in the process of taking possession of her anatomy, her sexuality and the eroticised image she presents to the world.

This collection is concerned with the co-existence in woman of Eros and Thanatos: the Freudian names for the life instinct and death drive which are inherent in all of us. The Garden of Lust and Hunger, for instance, presents us with a post-lapsarian Eve whose near-nakedness eroticises her just as her black nipples suggest the suckling not of life, but death. We are shown an Eve wholly sympathetic to and informed by her predecessors in the panoply of female symbols and archetypes: Lillith, the first woman to demand equal status to Adam; Baubo, a female demon said by the ancient Greeks to be the personification of female genitalia; and Kali, the sometimes benevolent, sometimes violent Hindu goddess. Thus, banished from Eden, Tollens’ Eve becomes a dark goddess who must destroy before she can create.

Tollens’ work abounds in this kind of cultural allusion. In Hunters Mourning, for instance, the artist subverts another symbol drawn from Greek mythology: this time the story in which the god Zeus takes the form of a swan and rapes the girl Leda. Tollens’ young model, dressed in white satin and looking for all the world like a dishevelled bride, clutches the neck of a dead swan: this is Leda unvanquished, an elegant portrait of a God slayer, a virgin perfectly capable of defending her honour by any means necessary. In Merci Monsieur Courbet, Tollens pays homage to Gustave Courbet’s famous depiction of female genitalia in The Origin of the World. This is thanks perhaps for the demystification of the representation of the vagina, although in this case, the luxuriant pubic hair has replaced with exotic plumage that is at once concealment and an invitation.

The title of this collection, Weird Nature, is an allusion to the traditional conception of woman as natural, spontaneous, emotional, un-intellectual and uncanny. In these images, Tollens re-conceptualises these disempowering and repressive symbols of femininity and recasts woman as intellectual, erotic and powerful.