The pioneering feminist artist behind.

Penny Slinger has a history with houses. In the early 1970s, the artist responsible for giving Dior’s recent couture show an occult edge, made surreal sculptures out of doll’s houses and used an abandoned country mansion as the backdrop for haunting collage works. Born in London in 1947, Slinger studied at Chelsea College of Arts at the end of the 1960s, when nearby King’s Road was the epicentre of the Swinging Sixties. Bold, clever and unabashed, even as a student Slinger was making strikingly original work using the tools of an earlier generation of male surrealists to explore the feminine.

In her Wedding Cake series, made in 1973, Slinger dressed in bridal white as a three-tier gateau, offering herself to be sliced into: a critical take on the packaging of women’s bodies for men’s desires. A striking beauty who modelled for Thea Porter, Slinger made a political point of posing naked for men’s magazines in which she talked about her work, confusing the idea that a beautiful woman in a state of undress was just an object to be looked at.

Slinger’s concept for Dior nods to her great work An Exorcism (1977). Seven years in the making, its experimental—and often sexually explicit—collages are set within the spectral, crumbling grandeur of Lilford Hall, a Jacobean pile in Northamptonshire, UK. Using posed photographs of herself, her girlfriend Suzanka Fraey and her ex-boyfriend, the filmmaker Peter Whitehead, Slinger used the building as a metaphor for the psyche, later describing the process as one of self-psychoanalysis.