NEVEN is delighted to present Potent-Female, a solo exhibition by British artist Jill Westwood. Theshow brings together photographs made by Westwood in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during a period in which artistic practice and everyday life were inseparable; an approach she would come to term “life as art”.

In 1983, Westwood received a letter from her friend, the artist Alex Binnie, professing his devotion and desire to submit to her. At the time, Westwood was studying at London’s Royal College of Art and staging radical performances with Fistfuck (1981-84), an industrial female duo formed with Diana “Chrystal” Rogerson, in collaboration with Antal Nemeth. In his account of Fistfuck in his article “Alpha Females”: Feminist Transgressions in Industrial Music (2022), Nicolas Ballet viscerally describes performances that unfolded as stark, ritualised confrontations. Appearing “swathed in leather and backed by a very aggressive soundtrack of noise and saturated sounds,” Westwood and Rogerson enacted scenes in which consenting participants were publicly bound, restrained, and subjected to the authority of the two performers. These acts were not staged as parody or spectacle, but as direct reversals of the violence and domination typically exercised by men within the industrial scene. Ballet emphasises that, here, it was men who “assumed the characteristics of the object-being,” willingly submitting themselves to a feminine authority exercised through discipline, composure, and control. This logic of domination would come to parallel Westwood’s private life, where similar structures of trust, power and care shaped her relationship with Binnie. Rather than separating public performance from domestic life, Westwood allowed the same dynamics to circulate across her art, relationship, and daily intimacy, treating each as an interconnected site for the lived reconfiguration of gender, power and eroticism.

The framed images in Potent-Female, taken between 1981 and 1983, variously depict Westwood, Binnie, as well as Matthew Bower, Binnie’s bandmate from the industrial group Pure, during his relationship with Westwood. These subjects appear variously bound, seated, masked, or held in states of heightened composure. Latex, a material associated with rubber fetish outfitting and performance, is prominent throughout the work, functioning as both material and metaphor: a second skin that compresses and abstracts the body while foregrounding touch, containment, and transformation. Westwood began experimenting with liquid latex while studying in Sheffield, producing handmade “second skin” garments which she would later develop and sell at Kensington Market and on the King’s Road under the names Fetisch or Die and Fetisch World Domination. These items sometimes incorporated nails, chains, and chicken bones, drawing on the material cultures of the Black Country near Birmingham, where she grew up. Long associated with heavy industry, metalworking, and rubber manufacture, the region’s histories informed Westwood’s understanding of materials that bind, protect, and constrain. In her photographic work, these early industrial references merge with the vernacular of fetish outfitting, aesthetics and symbolism, culminating in images such as Potent-Female (1983). With its sparse setting and profile pose, Potent-Female presents in many ways as a traditional, canonical portrait, recalling the austerity of James McNeill Whistler’s Whistler’s Mother, while the latex and heels redirect it toward an archetypal rendering of the subculture it speaks to. The result is both icon and anti-icon: an image of control, deliberate presentation, and self-authored authority.

Power crucially circulates in the images through posture, clothing, gesture, and spatial arrangement, rather than overt action. In Sovereign-Female-Subaltern-Male, a similarly poised Westwood sits with a collared Binnie crouched at her side. While this image, along with Potent-Female, appears to enact the reversals Ballet speaks of by positioning Westwood within traditionally masculine registers of authority (dominance, leadership, control, and command), it also destabilises those associations. Across both the Fistfuck performances and her photographic work, Westwood adopted, tested, and inhabited gestures historically coded as masculine within patriarchal visual languages. Early explorations in the exhibition vitrine show teenage self-portraits in which Westwood appears dressed as a boy, somewhat wryly clutching a book titled Approaching Manhood. While these carry a quietly irreverent humour, they also reveal an early and sustained interest in gender and authority as constructions and performances. However, it can be argued that Westwood’s work does not simply invert gendered hierarchies by placing a woman into a so-called masculine position. Rather, she produces a femininity that challenges historic conventions of dependence and submission. As sociologist Danielle J. Lindemann observes in her study of professional dominatrices, Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon (University of Chicago Press, 2012), power within dom–sub practices often operates through the strategic performance and deployment of femininity itself, rather than its rejection. Latex garments, she notes, “emphasise the femininity of their bodies,” while dominatrices preserve authority through distance and protocol. Yet Lindemann also argues that gender in these contexts is produced subversively: “The figure of the dominatrix has such cultural salience because it represents an interruption in the production of gender-normative sexuality.” (Lindemann, p.154-6). Read through this lens, Westwood’s performances and photographs do not simply appropriate masculine power but expose how authority can be produced through specifically feminine gestures.

Ultimately, Westwood’s photographs return us to the body as a site where gender, power, sexuality and identity are continually negotiated rather than assumed. The framed works are accompanied by candid images and ephemera in the vitrine, that reveal how this relational approach was further enriched by Westwood’s collaborative milieu. The dynamics and desires they depict resist the stability of conventional roles and presentations, allowing forms of relationship to emerge that feel open, fluid, and, at times, distinctly queer in their refusal of normative structures. In their composure and restraint, the images do not dramatise this shift; they simply allow it to exist, quietly but decisively, within the space of everyday, lived life.