The Process: How does an object become erotic?

In this special interview edition of the Process, artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen unpacks the background to her digital commission Grumpy.  

Sidsel Meineche Hansen is a Danish artist who is interested in how things are made, both through the lens of the industrial complex and material forms of craft. Her work looks at the ways gender is produced and mutated through the production of female gendered commodities in the tech and porn industry, such as the sex robot or the sex doll, exploring questions around ownership and profit.  

In Grumpy, her commission for our digital platform Channel, Sidsel created a computer-animated version of the anatomical Venus - a wax model of a dissected woman, clad in pearls, which was used to teach medical students' anatomy in the 18th Century. The head of the model hangs backwards, singing softly, as we pan up over her splayed open torso, revealing only the reproductive organs and a smiling foetus  

To make the work, Sidsel sourced real-life human sexual organs from a cadaver before working on the animation. In this special interview version of The Process, Sidsel unpacks the background to the work with the director of Somerset House Studios Marie McPartlin. She talks about her experience in the operating theatre, the questions it brought up about the role of the artist, the relationship between object and subject and what it was like to make the work while pregnant with her first child.  

 
Interviewer: Marie McPartlin 
Artist: Sidsel Meineche Hansen  
Executive Producer: Eleanor Ritter-Scott 
Producer: Alannah Chance  
Host: Laurent John 
Sound Engineer: Mike Woolley  
Theme Music: Ka Baird 

The Process is an artist-led podcast series, developed by Somerset House, which explores the new ideas, big questions and surprising tangents which emerge from the artistic process.

Drawing on the creative community both on site at Somerset House and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows artists as they explore one idea they’re currently pursuing, to see where it ends up. From financial astrology to the black renaissance, quantum listening to the transformative powers of cute, along the way we hear from a cross-section of thinkers who have inspired them to help shape where it might go next.