Pissing Women: The story behind Sophy Rickett’s shocking photos

In the newly published photobook of artist Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women, multiple artists, writers and cultural critics respond to Rickett’s iconic images of women in corporate drag pissing across London’s financial district. The contributors discuss a range of topics from the fantasy of feminine perfection and gender roles to how pissing on the streets is a means to resist gentrification, with some writers noting how shocked they were that these women were pissing standing up, unable to comprehend this seemingly unnatural physical feat. The artist Chila Burman asks, ‘But... how?”, while the poet Eileen Myles describes their ability to piss like men as “almost Olympic”. When I ask Rickett if there was any apparatus helping create that stream, she replies, “It was all natural.”

Even with Rickett’s assurance, looking at the photographs, you can’t help but feel disbelief. We are told that the bodies donning grey pencil skirts aren’t built for pissing while standing up straight, but, more crucially, we are conditioned to believe that women and queer bodies and any physical needs they have, including needing to pee, have to be veiled to maintain the mystery of the ‘feminine’. This conditioning became apparent to Rickett in 1994 at Glastonbury Festival when the then 23-year-old artist was confronted with the difference between how men and women piss. “Men seem so carefree; they do it in the open while we have to perform it in private,” the artist reflects. This observation and a subsequent conversation with a friend a few days later, where they speculated if women could piss standing up, prompted the artist to experiment and ultimately find the right technique to do it herself. 

Post-Thatcher, gender norms were still quite rigid, especially in the City. Seeing women pissing in public while dressed as workers unsettled those codes of behaviour in a direct and literal way that still feels confronting – Sophy Rickett

Primed by this discovery – questions of bodily autonomy and the stifling corporate environment of the Financial Times, where she worked at the time – Rickett arrived at the image of women inhabiting the visual language of corporate culture while pissing on the very concrete that supposedly feeds them. “Post-Thatcher, gender norms were still quite rigid, especially in the City. Seeing women pissing in public while dressed as workers unsettled those codes of behaviour in a direct and literal way that still feels confronting,” she explains.

Since the series was first exhibited 30 years ago, responses have been mixed. Art institutions were quick to dismiss the work as the wrong kind of perverse. Online, the images found their way onto fetish sites, revealing to Rickett how often “uncensoring” women’s bodies leads to their sexualisation in ways male bodies often escape. “When the series first circulated and began appearing on porn and fetish websites, I had a strange double reaction,” she says. “It was confronting, even violating, to see my work co-opted into a completely different context. That’s one of the striking things about photography: the multiple ways a subject can be deployed, put to use. At the same time, it reveals a wider and deeply problematic truth about how quickly female and queer bodies are funnelled into frameworks of sexualisation and consumption, regardless of intention. That dynamic is precisely what the work seeks to challenge.”

To mark the series' republication, Sophy Rickett reflects, in her own words, on the making of Pissing Women, and the challenges that came with it.

“Like most creative work, it emerged through a convergence of influences and circumstance. After completing my undergraduate degree, I continued to develop my photography skills, but money was tight, and I needed the security of a regular income. In 1995, I found myself temping at the Financial Times, experiencing corporate culture from the inside for the first time. It was a world completely alien to me, fascinating to observe at such close quarters, yet from the position of a relative outsider. Within the office, I saw how gendered behaviours were performed and reinforced, in ways both overt and insidious. My initial feelings of frustration and entrapment gradually shifted into recognition: that proximity to a corporate institution like the Financial Times could be a source of material, a place from which to make work. Pissing Women became a means of exploring my own complicity, while at the same time testing strategies of resistance.

“It was exhilarating, risky, and often absurdly funny. After work, we would head out into the city at night with our cameras, tripods and flashguns, probably more conspicuous than we ever realised. Location scouting often took far longer than the shoots themselves, as we searched for sites that carried symbolic weight that related to finance, communication, and security. Once we began, a sense of jeopardy set in, the possibility of being spotted, challenged, or confronted by passersby or security guards, which, inevitably, at times, we were. 

“Looking back, the ’power dressing’ of the 1980s – women’s suits with exaggerated shoulder pads and big sculpted hair – had a literalism to it, as if taking up more space was itself a way of signalling power. By the 1990s, with the recession, the culture had shifted; everything felt more relaxed and lower-key. At art school, the term ‘deadpan’ was everywhere, a move toward non-expressiveness, and that was the attitude I wanted to capture. Around the same time, riot grrrl and ladette culture were emerging. Both movements were tied to counterculture, expressing rebellion through style and behaviour. Styled explicitly as 'riot grrrl,' the gesture wouldn't have had the same impact; it wouldn't even have seemed that strange. The Pissing Women figures, by contrast, are dressed as City workers, inhabiting the visual language of business and corporate life. Maybe there’s something transgressive in that tension: that they are ’normal’, part of mainstream culture, and that there is nothing out of the ordinary in their co-opting of a behaviour that was, and still is, so strongly coded as male.

The pressures with creating radical work about women’s bodies never really go away, but they do shift in form. In the 90s, it was gallery censorship and being misread through porn; today, it’s algorithms and online moderation – Sophy Rickett

“Pissing Women is a foundation stone of my practice – a challenge and a continuing inspiration from my younger self: confident, exuberant, and perhaps a little naïve. Although my work has since evolved, the central preoccupations were already in place: questions of gender and power, and the pursuit of alternative narratives and resistant strategies. That early interest in how environments shape and condition behaviour remains, though writing has become more central, and my projects now typically unfold through sustained research into specific cultural sites. Yet the resonance of Pissing Women endures through my ongoing engagement with the condition and representation of the ‘feminine’, and with the processes by which identities are formed, constrained, distorted, and sustained, albeit articulated through more nuanced visual strategies than those I employed at 25.

“The pressures with creating radical work about women’s bodies never really go away, but they do shift in form. In the 90s, it was gallery censorship and being misread through porn; today, it’s algorithms and online moderation. Institutions still struggle with images of women’s bodies – they're policed, flagged, suppressed. That instability is exactly what Pissing Women plays with, and it still makes people uncomfortable. In republishing the photographs now, I want to hold onto that tension rather than neutralise it. The work doesn’t aim to censor the body or control interpretation, but to make visible the instability of those readings – the way meaning slips between liberation, eroticism, shame, and spectacle. By foregrounding that instability, the photographs become less about exposing bodies and more about exposing the cultural structures that discipline them.”

Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women is published by Cheerio and is available now. The exhibition Stream, featuring artworks by Sophy Rickett and Rut Blees Luxemburg, is running at Cob gallery until 27 September 2025.