In Volume V of SPBH Book Club, Esther Teichmann presents a rarefied and ambiguous exploration of female pleasure. Backdrops and shells, sculptures and the sea, the imagined and the painted, the real and the staged – it all appears in Teichmann’s chimerical paradise. By referencing classical representations of women in the history of art, most often in the hands of and for the consumption of men, Teichmann reclaims the traditional pictorialism of femininity in a subversive and provocative manner. All of the complex forms of womanhood and yearning emerge – the lover, the mother, self pleasure, sensuous pleasure and the women appear as characters, specters and statues as flesh turns to stone and back again. With a layered mix of photographs – some of which are collaged on the book pages – and an original, handprinted cyanotype on the front cover, the book is an object of tactility and longing.

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