The Clandestine Purse

Natasha Caruana 2008

The red purse travelled with Natasha Caruana on each of the 80 dates she arranged for her series ‘Married Man’. In it, she hid a sound recorder to capture her conversations. The image also references the celebrated middle English poet Chaucer’s suggestion of the woman’s vagina as a ‘purse’. It can be seen as a monument to the stories told by the married men and to the variety of exchanges made in the process of the different stages of courtship.

Materials

C-type photograph

Exhibition

Data Anthropologies: Natasha Caruana Love is an Act
17 July - 16 December 2015 at the Open Data Institute

Data Types

Anecdata, Causal, Live, Personal

About the Artist

Natasha Caruana (b.1983) is a photographic artist whose work is characterised by bold and inventive uses of performative strategies, sharply tuned interpersonal skills and scientific processes. She is concerned with narratives of love, betrayal and fantasy,…
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The Clandestine Purse, Natasha Caruana, 2008