Figure with double pouch 1975

Gareth Sansom employs potent symbols in his paintings and collages, to explore gender identity, satirise social norms and interrogate the artmaking process. Figure with double pouch 1975, for example, is a painting that resembles a collage in its jumbled shapes, patterns and composite figures.

Collage was a strategy used by dadaist and surrealist artists to construct new modes of expression through which they could critique social and artistic traditions. In this work, Sansom’s cluster of phallic shapes float around a figure with a dog’s head and a doll’s arm, who wears a laced corset and utilitarian double pocket. Combining masculine and feminine signifiers with human and animal forms, the figure points to the artist’s practice of cross-dressing to escape the strictures of conservative, fixed identities. A curious red figure with an exaggerated nose resembles Pinocchio, the fabled magical puppet who longs to be a ‘real boy’ and whose nose grows when he tells a lie. In this way, Sansom exposes what he sees as the fallacy of society’s fixed expectations of gender identity – a theme with a continuing presence in his work.