Lunar Women
Collage and chemigram, 2022
Lunar Women continues Ready’s intervention into the nineteenth-century photographic archive of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where female patients diagnosed with hysteria were photographed under the direction of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The women were directed, hypnotised and repeatedly photographed performing their symptoms for the camera and medical audiences.
About the Work
In Lunar Women, Ready removes faces of these women from the archival photographs and relocates them onto chemigrams made using expired photographic paper. The chemigram process introduces chance into images that originated within the highly controlled environment of the hospital photographic studio: photographic chemicals spread, stain and react unpredictably, creating new spaces in which the figures are placed.
The works imagine a final, performative act: a walkout from the medical photographic studio and the structures that sought to observe, categorise and define these women. Released from their original settings, the figures inhabit an unstable, uncontrolled visual world shaped by chemistry and chance. For the first time, they appear somewhere the camera never placed them.
Medium
Collage on chemigrams with hand-cut archival photographs, made on expired photographic paper.
Selected Presentations
Jackal Independent Art Space, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 2026
Modern Art Oxford, Instagram feature
Fast Forward: Women in Photography, Instagram feature
