ANYTHING BUT NEUTRAL

PLAYING WITH THE POSTURAL POSSIBILITIES WITH PAULINE GUDET

“WTF IS A NEUTRAL POSITION?”

asks Pauline Gudet in a post on Instagram, as she bends and rolls her body into an uncomfortable looking yet elegant arch, dressed in sequins, a blonde wig and oversized heels.

There’s nothing we enjoy more than a challenge to conformity – well, that, and finding women whose ideas overlap and mirror some of our own.

Pauline Gudet, with the help of the flexible talents of Arianna and Glorietta, in a series of playful scenes intertwines bodies, dresses and shoes, bending and contorting into unexpected positions to capture the push and pull between the different roles we play in life and all the parts that make up who we are.

In her latest work ‘Femme a la recherche du Prix’ (2026) (Woman Looking for an Award) she creates a fictional authority, the Official Authority of Recognition (OAR), that asks women to apply for recognition as if it were an office administrative procedure.

Creating humorous products to help them in their quest for validation, from an ‘Official Conformity Kit’, to a paper pattern for high-heeled shoes in the ‘Walk for Recognition Assembly Kit t38’, that allows you to build your own path to recognition.

Her artistic practice seems to sit in an intriguing duality to the years she spent performing at Crazy Horse, the legendary, avant-garde Parisian cabaret. There, her craft was to move in sensuous synchronicity, a choreographed player in a glamorous, disciplined system. Although Pauline says this experience

“CONTINUES TO SHAPE THE WAY SHE THINKS ABOUT MOVEMENT, BODIES AND IMAGE-MAKING.”