Carole Feuerman’s fragmented bodies

By Leanne Sacramone

What happens when we become unwitting voyeurs? Carole Feuerman’s early sculptures – fragments of torsos, buttocks, and groins cast directly from female bodies – place us in this uncomfortable position. Their painted surfaces, rendered with extraordinary precision, replicate the tones and textures of living flesh, heightening a sense of physical immediacy that makes our viewing feel intrusive. Feuerman’s sculptures ask us to consider not just how women’s bodies are displayed and desired, but also the unconscious projections and fantasies that shape our encounters with them. Lacking heads and arms, these incomplete figures are sometimes grasped or groped by disembodied hands, as if animated by unseen desires. Feuerman has described them as “intellectual pieces of relationships”[1] suggesting that their strange eroticism is meant to engage the mind more than the senses. This tension – between the sculpture’s palpable surfaces and their detached presence – stirs feelings that are more ambivalent than overtly sexual. They invite the impulse to touch, but just as strongly make us aware of our own looking, arousing a mix of curiosity, discomfort, and unease.

Feuerman’s sculptures draw on a long tradition in which the fragment is more than a broken remnant; it is a form with its own evocative power. Statues from classical antiquity survived only in pieces, and their partiality came to signify a lost ideal of beauty, eliciting what art historian Linda Nochlin described as a “poignant regret for lost totality.”[2] In religious contexts, ex-votos represent an afflicted body part in sculptural form. Offered either in hope of divine intervention or in thanks for recovery from illness, they embody the supplicant’s vulnerability and desire for healing. At the end of the nineteenth century, Rodin made expressive use of isolated limbs, torsos, or heads, which he moulded directly from live models and recombined across different works, believing that a fragment could convey as much emotional or formal intensity as a whole figure. The power of the fragment lies in its incompleteness: it concentrates meaning on what remains and, just as strongly, on what is absent, inviting projection, longing, and loss.

Feuerman’s early work emerged at a moment of feminist reappraisal around how female bodies were represented in art and culture; a conversation her practice seems to both absorb and reflect. In the 1970s, feminist artists were beginning to reclaim the female form from a legacy of objectification, pushing back against the ways it had long been framed by male desire. They called for a new kind of visibility: one that honoured female pleasure, autonomy, and embodied experience. At the same time, the approval of the Pill and the rise of the sexual revolution gave women unprecedented freedom to explore and express desire outside the constraints of the societal expectations that had shaped women’s sexual lives and governed female respectability. Yet with that freedom and new visibility came tensions. Women were urged to embrace sexual liberation, but often in ways that still catered to male fantasies or reinforced dominant power structures. This contradiction was perhaps most apparent in visual culture, where women continued to be objectified and commodified rather than acknowledged as whole persons with their own agency. In response, artists and critics began challenging the fragmenting gaze of male desire, which often reduced women to isolated body parts severed from personal subjectivity.[3]

Rather than dismiss fragmentation entirely, some feminist artists appropriated it as a means to explore alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the body. Painter Joan Semmel, for instance, rejected the framing devices of pornography and the objectifying perspective of the male gaze. Her so-called “fuck paintings” emerged from a collaborative studio practice in which she and others filmed, photographed, and drew sexual activity. Semmel painted from these images using a non-naturalistic palette – yellows, slate blues, eerie greens – and focused on parts of the body, representing sexual activity from unexpected points of view.

Feuerman’s treatment of the fragmented body departs sharply from Semmel’s expressive, subjective approach. Instead of brushwork and exaggerated colour, she turned to life-casting, using people from her immediate circle to create sculptures with uncanny precision. Her castings are rendered down to the pores, veins, and even the subtle imprints of clothing against flesh. And yet, despite their startling realism, her figures remain anonymous: presented without faces, names, or narratives; they are frozen mid-action and stripped of context. This distance intensifies our discomfort, positioning us not as neutral observers but as intruders complicit in the scene’s uneasy intimacy.

Part of what makes Feuerman’s early work so hard to categorise is its ambiguity. While it clearly engages with ideas about agency, sexuality, and representation, it resists easy alignment with feminist critique or affirmation. This uncertainty may reflect Feuerman’s own position in relation to the feminist movements of her time. As she told me, she felt she had “missed out” on feminism.[4] Rather than engaging with feminism as a collective political movement, her experience was shaped more by the individual challenges of navigating artistic ambition within conventional gender roles. Married at the age of eighteen, she became a mother when barely an adult herself. When her children were still young, she worked as a professional illustrator while studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, pursuing her artistic career with fierce determination. Her path exemplifies a different kind of feminist struggle, one defined by the persistence required to claim creative space while managing the practical demands of supporting a family.

Feuerman’s first foray into sculpture came in 1977, when she was commissioned by New Times magazine to produce a cover on the subject of androgyny.[5] It was for this project that she first experimented with life-casting – a technique that would become central to her work, though she initially approached it in an exploratory, provisional way. She cast a male and female bust in wax, sliced each vertically in half, and joined opposite halves to form a hybrid figure—half male, half female. This androgynous figure has an unnerving presence, both lifelike yet strangely inert. On the cover, the sculpture appeared twice, forming a mirrored pair of androgynous torsos. Androgyny was a subject of wider cultural interest at the time, embraced as a metaphor for gender equality and fluidity.

Philosopher Mary Daly described masculinity and femininity as “caricatures of human beings” and advocated for “an androgynous mode of living” in her 1973 book Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.[6] The art world likewise engaged with this theme: the November 1975 issue of Artforum included three articles on the androgyne. Feuerman addressed these conversations through a surreal juxtaposition.

She soon began to explore the casting technique in a more personal register. Feuerman’s first independent experiment was also in wax and made while she was still a student. Assigned to create an erotic artwork, she cast her own hip and, using paint, transformed the cast into what appears to be a pubic area veiled by translucent green panties. Feuerman told me she intended the piece to be humorous and that she was drawn to the idea of creating a visual puzzle.[7] The result is a provocative and playful sculpture that invites the viewer to question what they are seeing.

Feuerman has spoken of her admiration for René Magritte, who used realism to create visual riddles that questioned the nature of representation itself. One work she may have had in mind is L’Évidence Éternelle (1930), in which he divided the body of his model (his wife Georgette) across five separate canvases, prompting the viewer to mentally reconstruct the figure from its discreet parts. Magritte literally breaks the frame, while Feuerman breaks with sculptural conventions by isolating a body part, turning the cast into a standalone object and denying the viewer full narrative or anatomical context.

An even closer comparison might be The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (1929), Magritte’s famous exercise in visual paradox. Feuerman’s painted cast of her hip plays on a similar slippage. It mimics the appearance of a private part yet offers just enough visual ambiguity to cast doubt. Like Magritte, Feuerman stages a conscious provocation: this is not what you think it is.

Following these early wax pieces, Feuerman turned to resin and began working with other fragments, including breasts, buttocks, and hands. These works were the result of a carefully controlled artistic process. The casting began with direct contact: she applied moulding material over the skin, often layered with fabric, to create a negative impression. Into this, she poured plaster of Paris to form a positive cast, which she refined by hand — smoothing, correcting, and adding missing details. From there, she created a silicone mould and then cast the final version in resin, which she painted and finished with great care. This step-by-step process was tactile and collaborative, requiring attention not just to technique but to the people she worked with.

This turn from playful illusion to more emotionally charged realism is especially visible in Breast, a cast of a single breast in a rumpled bra. One can’t help but think of Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher, which was produced for the first postwar Surrealist exhibition. For the deluxe limited-edition run of the exhibition catalogue, Duchamp and artist Enrico Donati glued a foam-rubber prosthetic breast to the cover, ringed in black velvet, and hand-painted it to resemble the breast of sculptor Maria Martins. It was witty and deliberately provocative, poking fun at museum decorum and Duchamp’s idea of “anti-retinal” art, which aimed to stimulate not just the eye but other senses, like touch.

Like Duchamp, Feuerman isolates a single erogenous zone. Yet where Duchamp’s prosthetic is openly ironic, Feuerman’s cast breast feels unexpectedly tender. Taken directly from a real body, it bears the intimate traces of a specific person – subtle tonal shifts in the skin, the wrinkles and puckers of an unremarkable bra, and its delicate stitching and lace – captured with meticulous care.

Where Breast remains an isolated fragment, the inclusion of hands in Feuerman’s sculptures shifts the focus from visual presence to tactile engagement — the body as something that touches and is touched. The sculpture Kiss depicts the headless torso of a woman with her breasts exposed. A pair of male arms wraps around her from behind, the left hand clasping the right breast, not gently but with a firm, deliberate, almost clinical grip. The thumb presses into the soft flesh of the breast, a detail that heightens the sense of physical tension. The woman’s body is rigid, the ligaments at the base of her neck taught, her breasts sag slightly under their own weight. The man’s hands reveal every detail: protruding veins, lined knuckles, carefully shaped fingernails, and fine hair on the forearms. Feuerman is fascinated by the way fingers press into flesh, leaving temporary imprints and subtly changing the colour of the skin – signs of contact that linger after the touch itself is gone. Her work asks us to consider not just what is seen but what is felt – how meaning arises through touch and the impressions it leaves behind. The title Kiss evokes tenderness, but what we see is a body grasped and displayed.

Where Kiss creates unease through contradiction, Red Tie pushes that discomfort further, combining sexual display with the suggestion of violence. The sculpture shows the nude torso of a woman, from below the chin down to the upper thighs. A bright red tie is wrapped around her neck, its ends gripped and drawn taut by a pair of male hands emerging from behind. The woman’s nipples are erect, her posture rigid, her body presented as spectacle. We are given no clues about who the hands belong to, nor about the agency of the woman being acted upon. Is this a portrayal of consensual fantasy or one of violence and coercion?

Three Hands presents an even more perplexing scene. A crotch clad in white underwear is gripped by three isolated hands: a small pale hand – its gender indeterminate – tugs at the waistband, while two large male hands impose themselves. One presses firmly down on the smaller hand, asserting dominance, the other slyly slips a finger beneath the elastic. The presence of a fly seam suggests we are looking at a pair of men’s underwear, yet the absence of a bulge and the curve of the hips and the uncanny way the crotch could just as easily read as buttocks, confounds stable readings of anatomy, identity, and intent: is this a man’s body or a woman’s? Is the smaller hand resisting or assisting? We are left wondering whether we are witnessing a moment of passion or a breach of consent.

In The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, art historian Lynda Nead argues that the Western tradition of the female nude is based on ideals of control and containment. The nude, she explains, is not just a naked body but a body shaped by artistic conventions that discipline what she calls “the threat of flesh.”[8] These conventions frame the body, both literally and metaphorically, to maintain its status as art and keep it from spilling into what might be seen as obscene. Feuerman’s wall-mounted sculptures, with their irregular, torn edges and lack of defined outlines, resist containment. Though their surfaces are rendered with striking realism, the forms remain hollow and visibly incomplete. By breaking the frame and withholding wholeness, Feuerman implicates us in the act of looking. She invites us to mentally complete what is missing, making us more aware of the conventions that shape what we see.

Depicting the nude body is never just about physical form; it evokes the imaginary and symbolic, exposing the body’s unstable boundaries and its fraught relation to the self. These are never fixed. As theorists like Paul Schilder and Elaine Scarry have observed, we often extend our sense of self into external objects, incorporating them into our bodily image.[9] The idea of a complete or stable body is therefore always elusive. Feuerman’s sculptures seem to linger in this liminal space, drawing attention to the fragmentation of our material selves, highlighting the tension between what is physically present and what is missing or broken. When asked about the raw edges of her sculptures, Feuerman told me: “I kind of identified with tears. Maybe the fragmented edges had something to do with my own life because I felt torn.” She has said that these sculptures were shaped not only by her hands but by her own experience, by her longing for connection at a time when her marriage was failing.[10] Her words suggest that the raw edges of these works may point to ruptures or states of incomplete connection.

The stillness in Feuerman’s early sculptures can be disquieting. The erotic is never far from the inert, and the suggestion of arousal is shadowed by the fear of damage, of dismemberment, of something taken away. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud described human life as governed by two opposing forces: Eros, the drive to connect and preserve, and Thanatos, the impulse toward repetition, stasis, and death. That tension plays out in Feuerman’s early fragments. The hands that grasp, the bodies held in mid-motion, seem animated by desire, and yet they remain frozen, detached, and unresponsive. The works do not lead us toward resolution. Instead, they hold us in a state of suspension, where physical immediacy and emotional distance exist side by side. We are left looking, wondering, and not quite knowing what it is we’re seeing or feeling.

[1] Interview with the author April 23, 2025.
[2] Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, Thames and Hudson, New York and London, 1994, p. 7.
[3] See Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in The Power of Feminist Art (edited by) N. Broude and M. D. Garrard, Abrams, New York, 1994, p. 197.
[4] “I missed the feminist revolution because I got married at 18.” Carole Feuerman, interview with the author, April 23, 2025.
[5] New Times, January 7, 1977.
[6] Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Beacon Press, Boston, 1973, p. 207.
[7] “I thought it would be interesting to do these pieces without faces and you would wonder who they were. If I could touch the viewer through these fragments, they would react. So, I wanted to invite the viewer to complete the story.” Feuerman, interview with the author, April 23, 2025.
[8] Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 18.
[9] Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche, International Universities Press, New York, 1978; and Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985.
[10] “I was interested in these intellectual pieces of relationships because my own relationship was failing.” Feuerman, interview with the author, April 23, 2025.