The idea for this project came while working on Wallflowers from the series la dioptrique. The wall of Wallflower was borrowed from Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe and the phalli appear through its many cracks, masking the bodies behind. I felt that the phalli, extracted in this way from the context of the male body seemed almost inoffensive, even perhaps cute. I thought it might be possible to illicit sympathy or at least permit a broad range of narrative possibilities for the phallus as a visual protagonist despite the weight of its entrenched symbolism and negative association.

In our patriarchal society the phallus is automatically a symbol of power, but not just power, power driven by blood fever. It is often evoked in metaphor to describe the madness of war, the industrial ravaging of the planet or the corporate blind drive for profit. 

But the overbearing symbolism of the phallus seems to eclipse the fact that, for many of us, it is also a body part. As a young boy I absorbed the notion that a phallus was a fire breathing dragon that had to be locked in the cellar.