OUR COLLABORATION

Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen are a collaborative artist team who perform the characters in photographs which seek to connect everyday experience with precedents from art historical sources. Their contemporary interpretations of images from, for example, the Renaissance or the 19th Century, reveal moments of human transaction in which the roles of gender, status and power seem to be uncertain and in flux. Recurrent themes are power, ageing, death, sexuality, mirroring, doubling, sameness and difference.

Both artists are motivated by a personal search for identity and an investigation of how gender is signified, constructed and performed. They have gravitated towards photographic masquerade as a means of performing ‘femininity’ in order to question culturally-imposed gender stereotypes. Lundgreen is a woman, Sayers cross-dresses.

Much of their work assumes a feminist perspective which gently and ironically illuminates and critiques the misogyny embedded in many aspects of our cultural heritage. They are looking for new opportunities to respond to historical collections in galleries and museums, and also wish to develop opportunities for making and showing work in a site-specific context.