THE UNKNOWN HEROINE, 2019-2021

THE UNKNOWN HEROINE is a collection of narrative performative photographs and a limited-edition artist’s book. Sherry Wiggins enacts and performs the roles of “the Wife” and “the Princess” in staged photographs taken by photographer Luís Branco. This project is based on Wiggins’s interaction with the essay “THE ESSENTIAL WIFE or the the Unknown Princess,” written by French artist Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954). This essay is one of fifteen included in Cahun’s 1925 feminist text Heroines. Cahun’s surrealist text describes the life of an older woman who has lived out her life in stifling roles as a Wife, a Mother and an (unknown) Princess. Her husband dies and she is at long last semi-liberated from these constricted roles.

Wiggins brings her own experiences of living out these socially constructed female roles to her performance. We see Wiggins as both the Wife and the Princess, moving throughout a beautiful house—the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the stairs, the bedroom, the study and the garden. She is alone and seemingly psychologically imprisoned by her entitled and suffocating circumstances. We first see the Wife / Wiggins through a glazed window; her eyes are closed, and she is seated at a table with white tulips. As the Princess, her eyes are covered by a double strand of pearls. The Princess, smoking a cigarette in the garden, is surrounded by an array of blooming azaleas. A blurred Princess crouches in a nude gown on the stairwell, looking almost psychotic swinging her pearls.

More images and text portray the constraints and confinement of these roles that the Wife and the Princess / Wiggins are inhabiting. Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco made these staged photographs while in residence at Foundation OBRAS in Renkum, Holland. Wiggins created the text for the book in collaboration with writer and curator Cydney Payton. The book contains the Claude Cahun essay “THE ESSENTIAL WIFE or the the Unknown Princess” and an essay by Cydney Payton called “A Room of One’s Own.”  You can download Payton’s essay below. The book was designed by Joseph Logan.

Download the PDF “A Room of One’s Own” by Cydney Payton here

(photography by Luís Branco, book design by Joseph Logan)