The Unknown Heroine, 2019-2021
The Unknown Heroine is a collection of narrative performative photographs and a limited-edition artist’s book made in collaboration with curator and writer Cydney Payton. This project is based on Wiggins’s interaction with and physical embodiment of French feminist surrealist writer, performance artist and photographer Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954). Wiggins enacts and visually materializes Cahun’s essay, “THE ESSENTIAL WIFE or the the Unknown Princess,” one of the essays in Cahun’s 1925 Heroines text. Wiggins performs the heightened roles of “The Wife” and “the the Princess,” both of whom Cahun describes with intensity, bringing her own experiences of living out these socially constructed female characters. Wiggins and Luís Branco made these photographs while in residence at the OBRAS Foundation in Renkum, Holland.
Download the PDF “A Room of One’s Own” by Cydney Payton here
(photography by Luís Branco, book design by Joseph Logan)
There were white tulips in the garden.
The limited-edition book THE UNKNOWN HEROINE
… the pearls he shot on her eyes.
… the the Unknown Princess dreaming with a cigarette in the garden.
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It was all about the gaze.
She saw herself in “THE ESSENTIAL WIFE or the the Unknown Princess.”
As the Dutch Study filled with light . . .
The question became: What is a Masterpiece?
The limited-edition book THE UNKNOWN HEROINE