Karen Knorr

This particular series which addresses the picturesque genre in landscape as a space in between the masculine (sublime) and the feminine (beauty). The characters are androgyne a 18th century wig and contemporary garb, a few objects to signify a tongue in cheek allegorical figure in the landscape. There are text transfers which are transferred directly onto the wall of fragments of the texts alluded to in the English titles of the work. The title alludes to the utopian hope that one can reconcile pleasure with duty and reason with emotion. The scale of the work is domestic and alludes to the different shapes of paintings found in women’s boudoir's.

It is a bilingual work produced in 1992 as a celebration of Mary Wollstonecraft seminal feminist text published in 1792(A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and her alliances and disputes with Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau ( Dreams of a Solitary Walker), Voltaire (Candide) and other early feminists such as Emilie Chatelet( Discourse on Happiness), Louise d’Epinay(Pseudo-Memories)and Mary Astell ( On the Education of Daughters). Fellow travellers to the feminist cause were such thinkers as Condorcet ( Sketches Towards a Picture of the Progress of Human kind) and Paine ( Rights of Man) and this work vindicates the collaboration and dialogue between male and female freethinkers in the 18th century. These thoughts and dialogues between thinkers in France, Germany and England form the cornerstone of secular democracy as epitomised in The Bill of Rights and are never to be taken for granted. Particularly even more so since 9/11.