Female orgasm: a codex of sorts after Ursula K Le Guin

Emily Floyd is a renowned Australian artist whose works refer to modernist abstraction, feminism, and radical politics. Inspired by typography and graphic design, much of her work has a strong graphic sensibility. She often invents her own fonts in the spirit of avant-garde experimental typography, as seen in Dada, Bauhaus and Constructivism. Literature has also been an abiding influence and subject matter across Floyd’s practice.

The artist’s book and posters comprising Female orgasm: a codex of sorts after Ursula K Le Guin are companions to Floyd’s earlier 2017 work Kesh alphabet. This multi-part sculpture responds to science-fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always coming home, a fictional anthropological study of the Kesh people, who live in the distant future after society as we know it has collapsed. Underpinning Le Guin’s attempt to imagine an alternative, matriarchal social model, is an inverted Kesh alphabet and a glossary of words. Floyd’s sculpture spells out the Kesh alphabet noun banhe, which translates into English as ‘inclusion’, ‘insight’ and ‘female orgasm’, affirming a female space of experience and pleasure.

The book and posters for Female orgasm: a codex of sorts after Ursula K Le Guin further expand the installation’s ideas of female-centred language in printed form through imagery, typography, text and design. Together with Kesh alphabet, Floyd offers these works as a ‘spell or invocation’, conjuring a different future while reminding us that language is a system through which worldviews are shaped and expressed.

produced in collaboration with Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam
printed and published by Negative Press, Brunswick
text supplement by Anneke Jaspers