Neat emailed me in late March 2023 following the New Contemporaries exhibition at the RSA. My contribution to the exhibition had been the culmination of about 4 years’ work, and I was feeling relieved to have finished the series. I was also feeling immensely proud to have been offered the Walter Scott award by the RSA - my self-confidence was finally increasing again as a result of this positive recognition. Neat’s email confused and upset me. It was, on the face of it, an expression of admiration and an invitation to participate in a forthcoming exhibition dedicated to him. But then it opened with a pair of sexually explicit poems dedicated to me. This obviously changed the dynamic of the email. It made me feel, among other things, creeped out.
On the one hand, I felt happy that someone who was apparently ‘an honorary academician at the RSA’ was ‘delighted’ and ‘impressed’ by my work. But on the other, I felt embarrassed by and ashamed of the poems with which he chose to begin his email. I showed the email to my contact at the RSA to get their view on what to do. The RSA investigated the issue on my behalf. The next thing I knew, though, Neat had resigned from the RSA and leaked it all to the press, refusing my invitation to him to apologise to me in person. The article, which featured in print, presented me and my work in base, cruel, and simplistic terms - I was dubbed, for example, a ‘naked artist’. Of course the terms of the article stood in contradiction with the admiring words Neat had written to me only a few months before. Yet he seemed happy for the article to go through, for me to be publicly humiliated, and for the exhibition in which he had apparently wanted me to participate so much to be cancelled. Obviously my mental health plummeted, as Neat must’ve known it would. So much for admiration.
Despite involving the body, my work is in fact not intended to be read in an overtly or straightforwardly sexual way. In fact, a key motivation for my work — which involves endurance walks across harsh landscapes, and is inspired by artists like Nan Shepherd, Margaret Tait, Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramović— is to actively escape the feeling of being sexualised and objectified by powerful men. Part of why I seek solace in these landscapes through my work is because I find in them a form of myself that’s less anxious about objectification, sexual violence and abuse — things I have endured, like many women, throughout my life. So there is a kind of bitter irony in what’s happened.
I didn’t know whether to forward Neat's email to my friends and parents in celebration. I felt too embarrassed to do so in the end.
As he seems to have gleaned, I found within Neat’s email a kind of disturbing abuse of power. He claims he has no relevant power because he apparently doesn’t have a high yearly income. But there are other forms of power than financial power. The email lorded authority over me with one hand — inviting me to participate in an exhibition in his honour — and objectified me with the other. Amia Srinivasan explains in her book The Right to Sex that the essence of sex discrimination lies in treatment that reproduces inequality. That is, it’s one thing for someone to send an artist an admiring email featuring sexually explicit poems. It’s quite another thing for a man self-describing as ‘an honorary academician at the RSA’ for whom the institution is to apparently organise a ‘major’ and ‘groundbreaking’ exhibition that I may yet participate in (if I respond appropriately) to do so.
One sad fact is that although I felt revolted by the poems, I nearly forced myself to try to ignore them, because I knew the exhibition he was dangling in front of me would be good for my career, and that sucking this kind of thing up is often what women in the art world have to do to get where they want in life. I wonder if Neat would have written about ‘limbs spread delight…Laid bare’, or ‘the thought of you: bare / Naked on that rock, or up / Against a wall: my / God’, if it was an older man — perhaps of his age — whose naked body featured in the art he was writing about. I still don’t understand why Neat couldn’t simply compliment my work, invite me to make some more, or discuss it with me on intellectual grounds. Why did he also have to dedicate sexually explicit poems to me?
I initially wanted to give Neat the benefit of the doubt. I actually invited him to apologise to me in person, but he refused. If he’d apologised to my face, sincerely, I would’ve accepted it. He may have made a mistake and regretted it after he sent the email. People make mistakes! Even if not, he may have later realised that my feelings had been hurt, that he’d misunderstood the spirit of my work, and that he should apologise. It’s even possible that he didn’t know what he was doing when he sent them. Feminist Catharine MacKinnon writes that women are ‘violated every day by men who have no idea of the meaning of their acts to the women.’
What he did, while unpleasant and troubling, perhaps wasn’t a form of abuse or violence that might merit, for example, coverage in a national newspaper, which would (of course) only bait a culture war whose participants are already so entrenched behind their battlelines. But he didn’t apologise to me – instead he spoke to the Times and cruelly mischaracterised me and my work. This itself is a kind of attack on me – an emerging artist for whom every piece of press coverage matters – that actually overshadows, in some ways, the original email. The last thing I wanted was for this to go public in the way it has, and yet, thanks to Neat, it’s gone that way.
What’s happened has encouraged me to redouble my efforts to make my work deal with the theme of its own reception. There are interesting ironies and challenges to explore in how my work is received and responded to by an insensitive (and predominantly male) minority. Professionally speaking, I only want to make my work, engage with others’ work, and have my work engaged with, properly and on the work’s own terms.