Double Take: Chasing the Specter of Claude Cahun – posted on April 11, 2026 in Boulder, Colorado

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

Luís Branco and I created the image above in Jersey on St. Brelade’s Bay in February of this year. We were working in conversation with the doubled and reversed horizon photograph that Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore made in the front yard of their home on St. Brelade’s Bay in 1939.

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1939.

I have been back from Jersey for several weeks, sorting through, contemplating and editing the images that I made there with photographer Luís Branco. The photographs that French artist Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954) created with her partner in art and life, Marcel Moore (1892 – 1972), over their lifetime together, have possessed me for years now. They are my heroines. Since 2019, I have been researching their lives and works and making performative photographic works with Luís that are in dialogue with their practice.

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore lived out their final years on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands located off the coast of Normandy. Luís and I made the trip to Jersey to retrace their lives and to reimagine and reconstruct the photographs they made there. We worked all around St. Brelade’s Bay, where Claude and Marcel lived: in the broad tidal beach, in the golden rocks nearby, in the cemetery where Cahun and Moore are buried and along the portion of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall that runs along St. Brelade’s Bay. We also spent time in the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Archive in St. Helier, which holds the largest collection and archive of Cahun and Moore’s photographs, artworks and written works anywhere.

Recap

But first, for those of you who don’t know about Cahun and Moore, I will do a recap of their complex, beautiful and fearless lives. Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob in Nantes, France in 1894 into a prominent, intellectual, Jewish family. Her father, Maurice Schwob, was a respected publisher. Marcel Moore was born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe in 1892, also to a well-to-do family in Nantes. Lucy and Suzanne became best friends at a young age. As it happens, Suzanne’s mother married Lucy’s father, and they became stepsisters. They started taking photographs together in their early teens, most always with Lucy as the subject and Suzanne behind the camera. Theirs was a primarily private practice that continued throughout their life together. Neither had any training in photography and both were talented artists in other mediums.

In their early twenties, Lucy took on the nom de plume Claude Cahun and Suzanne adopted the name Marcel Moore. Cahun was a surrealist writer as well as a journalist, translator and intellectual. Moore was a fine artist, painter and illustrator. They moved to Paris together in 1920 and became part of the vibrant cultural life that existed there during the twenties. Cahun performed in avant-garde theater, they attended films, and they were active in literary and intellectual circles. Cahun published her feminist text Héroïnes in 1925 and, in 1930, completed her opus, a surrealist anti-memoir called Aveux non Avenus, which included remarkable photomontages made in collaboration with Moore. Their photographs made in Paris during the twenties challenge stereotypes of the female ‘subject,’ identity, fixed gender, the ‘gaze’ and subjectivity. Their work challenged the fundamentals of how photographs were made. The image below is one of Cahun and Moore’s few titled images, Que me veux tu?. Luís and I made our own version, What do you want from me?, last year at La Napoule Art Foundation.

Que me veux tu?, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.

What do you want from me?, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

During the early- to mid-1930s, artmaking, writing and politics became necessarily connected for many artists and intellectuals due to the rise of totalitarianism, fascism and antisemitism. Cahun wrote for and was part of several of the more leftist groups, including the Surrealists, the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers and Contre-Attaque. Cahun and Moore also produced and exhibited surrealist objects and still life photographs during this time. However, by 1936, Cahun had become disillusioned with their lives in Paris, and she spoke of a “physical and primordial need to live in the countryside.”

Cahun and Moore decided on Jersey island, a place they both loved. They moved in 1938. Unfortunately for all, the Germans occupied Jersey and the other Channel Islands in 1940. Cahun and Moore made the decision to stay and actively (and courageously) resist the war and the Nazi occupation of Jersey, which they did for four long years. They were eventually discovered, jailed and sentenced to death. Luckily the war ended in 1945, and they were released. Their profound relationship and collaboration in art and life is alive and visible on Jersey Island.

Jersey Rocks

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.

Jersey is an island of massive rocks, tidal waters and sandy beaches. Before they moved to Jersey permanently, Cahun and Moore spent summer holidays there in the 1920s and 30s, always at the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel. The images they made during this time are very different from the more theatrical and performative photographs they were making in Paris. In Jersey, their photographs are grounded in this particular place, this island. Many of their images call into question the nature of the self and the body in relationship with the natural world. I particularly love the image of Cahun’s doubled profile against the rock formation that looks like a monumental stone body. I am pretty sure Cahun’s face is painted gold.

As you can see, Cahun and Moore frequently double images and/or reverse images vertically and horizontally, contradicting the concept that there is a singular ‘I’ or ‘self’ in place and time. There is a sense that Cahun’s bodies/selves have no boundaries or confines within space.

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.

We did several photoshoots in the golden rock formations on St. Brelade’s Bay. I brought gold make-up and black gauzy cloth. Our images are informed by Cahun and Moore’s, but they also remind me of works Luís and I have created in the landscapes and waterscapes of Portugal. The figure with the golden face / me is emerging / merging within the multi-colored rocks and tidal waters and resting within the steep stones that reach to the sky.  Working at low tide in cold and slippery conditions in February, sometimes barely clothed, was tricky.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

Permanent Move to Jersey

When Cahun and Moore moved, permanently, from Paris to Jersey in 1938, they reclaimed their given names, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe. (For this blog, I will continue to refer to them as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.) They presented themselves to the local islanders as sisters (remember, they really were stepsisters). They bought a large stone house called La Rocquaise that sits on St. Brelade’s Bay with money from their family inheritance. They filled the house with artworks, family heirlooms, a fabulous library. A large garden surrounded the house, and the bay was like an extension of their front yard. Friends visited from Paris, but Claude and Marcel kept to themselves as far as the local islanders were concerned. The locals they encountered thought of them as eccentric French ladies who walked their cat on a lead and sunbathed naked in the garden.

The War, the Occupation and Resistance

Claude and Marcel’s peaceful lives changed quickly when the Germans invaded and occupied Jersey and the other Channel Islands in 1940. Many of the islanders evacuated before the occupation began. Claude and Marcel made the conscious decision to remain.

In the Jersey Museum with the projected image that Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore took from inside their home in 1940. Notice the German soldiers crossing the beach. Photograph by Luís Branco

In the image above I am standing in front of a projected photograph in the Jersey Museum. The image was taken from inside Claude and Marcel’s home in 1940. Their beloved cat, Kid, sits in the window as German soldiers cross the beach on St. Brelade’s Bay.

Cahun and Moore’s resistance to the war and the occupation took on its own unique form in text and action. Claude and Marcel created hundreds, perhaps thousands of anti-war, anti-fascist written tracts in German. Marcel was fluent in German. They wrote the texts in different literary forms and on various types of paper. They wrote these tracts, which were basically anti-Nazi, anti-war, anti-occupation propaganda, as if from the point of view of a dissident German soldier inciting his fellow soldiers to resist the war and lay down their arms. They signed many of these tracts as ‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (the Soldier with no Name). I was able to view some of these tracts in the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Archive in St. Helier.

Cahun and Moore’s anti-Nazi tracts displayed at the Jersey  Museum. Photograph by Luís Branco.

This was perhaps the most creative ‘performance’ and action (and certainly the most dangerous) of their lives. Cahun and Moore produced these texts together over a four-year period, unbeknownst to anyone. They distributed the texts all around the island where the soldiers congregated and would find them—in cafés, tucked between pages of German magazines, in newsstands, in cigarette packets, on the windshields of German vehicles and on the gravestones of German soldiers buried in the cemetery beside their home on St. Brelade’s Bay.

On July 25,1944, five Gestapo agents arrived at their home. They found their illegal radio, typewriter, camera and some of their documents. Cahun and Moore were arrested, jailed and eventually sentenced to death. Claude and Marcel spent nine and a half months in the Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier, isolated from each other and under difficult conditions. Nevertheless, they found ways to communicate with each other and with other political prisoners and continued their resistance from within the jail. Luckily the Germans surrendered and the war in Europe ended before their execution. They were released on May 8, 1945, the day before Liberation Day on Jersey.

After the War

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1945.

This photograph of Cahun above was taken by Moore just after their release in front of their home on St. Brelade’s Bay. Cahun holds in her mouth the Nazi Luftwaffe insignia given to them by a German soldier who was a fellow prisoner in jail. Cahun’s semi-ironic gaze and her quirky smile with the ‘dirty bird’ in her mouth has thrilled and haunted me since I first saw it. Cahun and Moore had resisted and survived this horrendous time on Jersey against all odds.

Assemblage artist Jensina Endresen embroidered the Luftwaffe insignia for me. I stood on St. Brelade’s Bay (again very near to Cahun and Moore’s home) in my corresponding old-lady trench coat and scarf, biting down on the Luftwaffe.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

After the war, Cahun (and to a lesser extent Moore) continued to process the occupation, the war and their resistance. Cahun started a memoir recounting their resistance activities and jail time. Cahun and Moore continued their photographic practice as well. In 1947, Cahun and Moore created these images where Cahun embodies / performs ‘‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (the Soldier with no Name), the resistant German soldier (whom Cahun and Moore invented) who signed the numerous anti-Nazi tracts throughout the occupation. Cahun stands in their front yard near the cemetery in a military outfit, with tall boots and a small skull, smoking a cigarette with their Kid between her legs.

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

In the black-and-white images below, Luís and I reimage and reimagine Cahun and Moore’s ‘the Soldier with no Name.’  I am standing on the beach beneath Cahun and Moore’s home. Behind me is the large concrete wall built along St. Brelade’s Bay that was part of the extensive system of fortifications known as Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. These are two of my favorite images from our time in Jersey. I think I metamorphosized Cahun and ‘the Soldier with no Name.’

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

In the photograph below Cahun appears as a phantom or ghost in a white gown holding a blank mask to her face. Cahun and Moore shot this photograph with the headstones of St. Brelade’s Bay cemetery in the background. More than 300 German soldiers were buried in the cemetery on St. Brelade’s Bay during the occupation of Jersey. Cahun and Moore utilized the German cemetery (which was beside their home) as a site of resistance, placing their anti-Nazi propaganda materials on the German soldiers’ graves. After the war, the German soldiers’ remains were exhumed and buried in the Mont-de-Huisnes German war cemetery in France.  This is also the cemetery where Moore buried Cahun upon her death in 1954 and where Moore was buried after her death in 1972.

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

Luís and I did several photoshoots in and around the same cemetery and churchyard. Luís was hesitant at first, but acquiesced. It is not a creepy or pretentious place, though I have seen photographs of what it looked like in 1945 with a regiment of Nazi crosses standing on the German soldiers’ graves. Now it is a beautifully maintained garden of stones and greenery surrounding St. Brelade’s Parish Church, rising from the bay and proceeding up the hillside. I brought a white robe and black gloves, and we ended up using a funny mask that I had painted. We shot these images on Friday the 13th in February. In our time in Jersey, I felt Cahun and Moore’s presence perceptibly haunting me. This seemingly idyllic island still bears the traces of Cahun and Moore’s lives and experiences as well as those of the many others who suffered on Jersey during WWII.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

WIP, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2026.

I have reproduced Cahun and Moore’s images as scans taken from various books for my blog posts. I hope to get permission to use high-resolution digital scans from the Jersey Archive for an exhibition and limited-edition artist’s book I am planning that will include a selection of Cahun and Moore’s images and works intermingling with my and Luís’s works.

I have written another blog post about my experiences in Jersey: “Projections and Revelations: In the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Archive.” Here is the link: https://sherrywigginsblog.com/2026/04/12/projections-and-revelations-in-the-jersey-museum-and-the-jersey-archive-posted-april-11-2026-in-boulder-colorado/

Projections and Revelations: In the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Archive – posted April 11, 2026 in Boulder, Colorado

In the Jersey Museum with Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s dual projected images, made in 1928. Photograph by Luís Branco.

Seeing Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s images projected on the walls of the Jersey Museum on Jersey Island was a revelation. Several of their original small gelatin silver prints are displayed in the museum alongside Cahun’s original manuscripts and several of Cahun and Moore’s original anti-Nazi tracts made during the occupation of Jersey.

During my recent stay on Jersey Island, I was able to spend time in both the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Archive. Jersey Heritage, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the island’s culture, heritage and records, oversees the museum and archive, as well as many other sites on the island. The museum and archive are both located in downtown St. Helier, Jersey’s capital city. The museum houses an exhibition of ancient artifacts from the neolithic period through to the twentieth century. The archive holds artworks, artifacts, records and documents from ancient to modern times.   

Most relevant for me, the museum and archive hold the most important collection anywhere of Cahun and Moore’s works, including photographs, negatives, paintings, texts, letters, diaries, manuscripts and an assortment of anti-Nazi tracts. The museum displays a selection of Cahun and Moore’s original prints, manuscripts and texts on a revolving basis—they are rotated every few months to preserve and protect them. Large projected images appear on the walls of the museum every few minutes (much to my delight). The complete collection of Cahun and Moore’s works is held in the Jersey Archive and has been catalogued and documented in high-resolution digital images (and is available online at low resolution).

In the Jersey Museum with the projected image of Cahun (as the Devil, a character she performed in the play Le Mystère d’Adam in Paris in 1929). Photograph by Luís Branco.

In the Jersey Museum, one of Cahun and Moore’s photomontages sits next to the original of Cahun’s opus, the surrealist text, Aveux non Avenus (1930). Photograph by Luís Branco.

Before arriving on Jersey, I contacted Jersey Heritage Curation and Experience Director Louise Downie, an art historian and curator who has worked there since 1995. She supervised the purchase and collection of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s archive in the 90s and early 2000s.

Cahun died in 1954 and Moore in 1972, both in Jersey. Their works and lives virtually disappeared from the annals of art history, literary history and WWII history for decades. After Moore’s death, their possessions were auctioned off in lots. John Wakeman, a collector of surrealist books and photographs, bought their possessions for twenty-one British pounds. The collection was haphazardly stored in an assortment of cartons. Some of their more valuable artworks (drawings by Henri Michaux, a bust of Cahun by Chana Orloff) and books (by Hans Bellmer and Andre Breton) were sold off by Wakeman during the 70s and 80s.

In 1995, Jersey Heritage Trust acquired the remainder of the Wakeman collection, a disorganized jumble of photographs, negatives, manuscripts, bills of sale, postcards, letters and all sorts of written materials in French, English and German, all stored in a large tea chest. Louise Downie enlisted Claire Follain to sort through the materials. Follain is a Jersey native who was studying French history and the resistance during World War II in England at the time. Follain told me that going through this potpourri of materials was a fascinating puzzle and a major project.

Claude Cahun was named in the collection, as were Lucy Schwob, Suzanne Malherbe and Marcel Moore. At first, they were thought to be four distinct people; in fact, Claude and Lucy were one and the same, as were Marcel and Suzanne. As the puzzle was solved, Downie and Follain realized what a treasure trove they held in their hands. Downie (and other scholars and curators) began exhibiting Cahun and Moore’s photographic work. Other scholars and translators started pouring through the manuscripts. Follain wrote her thesis on Cahun and Moore’s resistance during the occupation of Jersey. In 2002, Jersey Heritage Trust purchased another smaller collection of Cahun and Moore’s photographs and some of Moore’s drawings and paintings.

At a similar period, in France during the late 80s and early 90s, while studying the surrealists, French art historian Françios Leperlier discovered a piece of Cahun’s writing from 1934—Les Paris sont ouverts—and one of her signed photographs. He has subsequently devoted much of his life’s work to Cahun’s writing and art practice, doing extensive research and curating exhibitions. He published the first biography of Cahun in 1992, L’Ecart et la Metamorphose, and compiled the most complete compendium of her writing in Les écrits de Cahun in 2002. Unfortunately, these two important works of Leperlier’s have yet to be translated into English.

All who are interested in Cahun and Moore have benefited from the scholarship and analysis of other curators, art historians, translators and scholars, such as Gen Doy, Tirza True Latimer, Susan de Muth, Norman MacAfee, Shelley Rice, Jennifer Shaw and many others. Cahun and Moore’s photographs, artworks, written works and life history are now, thankfully, well accounted for.

It was thrilling for me to meet Louise Downie (for coffee in the Jersey Museum café) and Claire Follain (for lunch) and to hear about their personal experiences and histories with Cahun and Moore’s works. Years later, they are still excited and inspired by these two women and their courageous lives, love and creative endeavors.

I spent two days in the Jersey Archive perusing its large collection of digital files of Cahun and Moore’s artwork, diaries, letters and texts. It was kind of overwhelming, but now I understand how to gain access to the materials in the archive. I hope to obtain high-resolution digital files of Cahun and Moore’s photographic work for a book and exhibition I am planning. The book and exhibition will interweave Cahun and Moore’s photographic work with my and Luís Branco’s performative photographic work.

In the Jersey Museum with the projected image of Cahun dressed as ‘The Soldier with no Name’ (the dissident German Soldier, the character Cahun and Moore invented during the occupation of Jersey during WWII). This image was taken by Marcel Moore in 1947. Photograph by Luís Branco.

Most of the texts, letters, diaries and manuscripts in the archive are in French. The anti-Nazi tracts are all in German. I don’t speak or read either language. I am fascinated by the tracts, the letters they wrote during their time in jail and Cahun’s writings after the war. My translations here are from Google translate.

One (#27) of Cahun and Moore’s tracts written during the occupation of Jersey between 1940 and 1944. A digital image held in the Jersey Archive.Translation below.

Which Man has the Right to sacrifice a people to save a Government?

The Revolution in Germany? … Indeed! And the longer the war lasts, the

longer and more chaotic the inevitable Revolution will be and the worse

the suffering of our women and children.

                                              the Nameless Soldier

Please circulate

One (#36) of Cahun and Moore’s tracts written during the occupation of Jersey between 1940 and 1944. A digital image held in the Jersey Archive. Translation below.

PROPAGANDA

STRENGTH THROUGH JOY

Goebbels: No! Now let us say: … Strength through …

… Despair. STRENGTH through DESPAIR

STRENGTH THROUGH DESPAIR

But the Nameless Soldier scribbles on the Walls;

Make an End of it! Make an End of it! Make an End of it!

One (#17) of Cahun and Moore’s tracts written during the occupation of Jersey between 1940 and 1944. A digital image held in the Jersey Archive. Translation below.

—So, sir have you lost the war?

—Certainly.

—But you are happy about it?

—Quite certainly.

—I don’t understand that. Why?

—Because I don’t want to squander my entire life in uniform!

                      ————

Thus spoke the Nameless Soldier.

As you can discern from these tracts attributed to the Nameless Soldier (the dissident German soldier invented by Cahun and Moore), Cahun and Moore wrote in different forms and voices to project their anti-war, anti-Nazi sentiments. They produced thousands of these tracts and distributed them widely on the island between 1940 and 1944. The Feldgendarmerie (German Field Police) had collected these tracts and were perplexed by them, assuming they were produced by a group of resistant German soldiers or islanders. They would never have suspected two middle-aged French ladies. However, Cahun and Moore were eventually discovered (it is not clear how), jailed and tried by a military court. They were subsequently sentenced to death for “propaganda undermining the morale of the German forces.” As I have noted before, the war ended before their death sentence could be carried out.

Once Cahun and Moore were discovered and arrested for their resistance work, they were jailed in Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier. There, they were isolated in separate cells. They had never been separated for any length of time during their adult lives. The archive contains sixty-two digitally preserved letters, originally written on toilet paper, that they exchanged while in jail. These pages are all in the same handwriting; I’m not sure whether they were written by Cahun or Moore. The Google translation below offers details of their daily lives while incarcerated.

One (#60) of Cahun and Moore’s letters to each other when both were in solitary cells in Gloucester Street Prison, written on Sunday, November 12, 1944. They wrote these letters on toilet paper. Digital images of these many letters are held in the Jersey Archive. Translation below.

Sunday 12 of November

My Love—what wretched weather.

This morning I looked out through the little

window, there wasn’t a soul in sight—

nothing but greyness and dampness.

I’m reading wrapped

in a blanket, with my hands

stuffed in my pockets.

That makes it bearable, at least.

But we could really use

a little excitement coming

from the outside world to shake off

this wintry torpor. — Did you

see the new guy who’s

staying with Number 2?

I glanced at him in passing

during my walk this morning,

he really has a pleasant face.

It has made our neighbor

much quieter; now that

he has company, he no longer

lets out those mournful cries

he used to make in the evenings

to get his buddies’ attention.

Cahun and Moore communicated with each other (and with the other prisoners) with notes passed through a secret ‘postal service’ that was established through the ventilation ducts; in this way, they established relationships with the other political prisoners. While searching through the archive I found images of the ‘Prisoners’ Autograph Book’ that Cahun and Moore had put together, which includes short epigrams and signatures by other prisoners. Even under great duress they mustered activities with the other prisoners with some humor and fun.

One of the pages from the ‘Prisoners’ Autograph Book’ put together by Cahun and Moore while in prison. In the Jersey Archive.

Viewing these documents and images in the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Archive gave me a whole new sense of the depth of Cahun and Moore’s resistance work, the creativity behind it and their dedication and persistence against all odds.

Below is one of my favorite images of Marcel Moore (standing) and Claude Cahun (seated) together in the doorway of their home, La Rocquaise, on St. Brelade’s Bay sometime after their release from jail in 1945. They are hardly ever pictured together, though they were inseparable in art and life.

In the Jersey Museum with the projected image of Moore (standing) and Cahun (seated) in front of their home La Rocquaise. Taken in 1945 after their release from jail. Photograph by Luís Branco.

After their release from jail, they gradually put their lives back together. The Germans had stripped the house bare, confiscating most of their art works, books, furniture, and other household items. Cahun’s health was very fragile—the time in jail had taxed her physically and emotionally. She continued to write about their resistance work and their time in jail. They thought about moving back to Paris; in 1953 they visited friends and looked for a place to live. Cahun became ill and they had to return to Jersey. She died in the St. Helier hospital on December 8, 1954. Moore eventually sold La Rocquaise and moved to the nearby village of Beaumont. Moore took her own life in 1972.

I have written another blog post “Double Take – Chasing the Specter of Claude Cahun” – about the photographic work Luís Branco and I made in Jersey. Here is the link:https://sherrywigginsblog.com/2026/04/12/double-take-chasing-the-specter-of-claude-cahun-posted-on-april-11-2026-in-boulder-colorado/

Part One – Pilgrimage to Jersey (and to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore) – Introduction and Jersey Before the War, posted in Boulder, CO. January 19th, 2026

I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun, Sherry Wiggins and LuÍs Branco, 2025.

Introduction

French artist, photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and her partner in art and life, artist Marcel Moore (1892 -1972), have been on my mind (and part of my art practice) for several years. Luís Branco and I shot the image above, as part of the series I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun, while working at La Napoule Art Foundation on the French Riviera. I am thinking (again) about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore as I prepare to make a pilgrimage to Jersey Island this February.

Claude Cahun (born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe) lived out the last years of their lives on the island of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, located in the English Channel between England and France. They moved from Paris to Jersey permanently in 1937. The Germans occupied Jersey (and the other Channel Islands) beginning in 1940; Cahun and Moore lived under German occupation from 1940 to 1945. During this period, Cahun and Moore undertook a valiant and creative campaign of resistance to the Nazis, the war and the occupation of Jersey. Four years into the occupation, they were discovered and arrested; they were jailed, tried and sentenced to death. Fortunately, the war ended, and the island was liberated before they were killed. They were released on May 8, 1945.

Jersey Heritage, an organization that protects the island’s culture and heritage, artifacts and archives, houses the largest collection of Cahun and Moore’s artworks, writings, and photographic works. Jersey Heritage also holds their letters and the records of their anti-Nazi, anti-fascist activities. https://www.jerseyheritage.org/history/claude-cahun-and-jersey/

St. Brelade’s Parish Church cemetery, beside the house where Cahun and Moore lived, is their burial ground. In my ongoing homage to and obsession with Cahun and Moore, I am making the trip to Jersey to explore the island where they lived and to make new photographs with my creative partner, photographer Luís Branco.

I will use feminine pronouns for Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore throughout this blog post. The gender-neutral pronouns we utilize today were not in use during their lifetimes. I will also stick, primarily, to the pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore that Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe adopted early in their lives.

In February of 2025, as artists in residence at La Napoule Art Foundation in France, Luís Branco and I created many new works in direct conversation with Cahun and Moore’s photographic works. These performative photographs reference works that Cahun and Moore made in the 1920s in Paris. Our combined images (both theirs and ours) are theatrical, sometimes campy, serious but not self-serious. I cut my hair short and acted out my more butch and thespian self. You can see many of these works on my website: https://www.sherrywiggins.com/work/m-in-training-with-claude-cahun

I shaved my head in an act of solidarity with Cahun. Cahun and Moore’s photographic portraits from roughly 100 years ago have been an inspiration for me and for many others. Cahun’s radical resistance to gender identification as either male or female, her fearless portrayal of the fluidity and theatricality of identity is so relevant today.  

On a personal level, Cahun’s work has been a provocation to examine my own cisgender female identity. The haircut was liberating for me: through it I realized that I identify (in current terminology) as a straight femme living in a queer world.

Que me veux tu?, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1929.

What do you want from me?,  Wiggins and Branco, 2025.

A transmutation occurs in me (a reconfiguring of my own identity) in the act of reinterpreting and re-representing Cahun in photographs. This uneasy but welcome metamorphosis / transfiguration of self that I have established with Cahun has continued to be a catalyst for my work.

Jersey before the War

Cahun and Moore vacationed on Jersey during the years before 1937. In contrast to the theatricality and sophistication of the images they made in Paris, the images they made on Jersey communicate a profound connection to the elements and the natural surroundings of Jersey. We see Cahun occupying liminal spaces, between earth and water, body and environment, self and nature.

In the first image below, Cahun’s figure is doubled and reversed and swathed in gauzy fabric in waters that border a rocky ground. The profile of Cahun’s golden head is doubled and opposed as her face merges and emerges within the terrestrial surface she faces in the second image. Cahun’s figure is barely visible within the rippled waters in the image En Océanie. In these photographs, Cahun and Moore mirror, double, reverse, mask and reflect concepts of self and identity within the natural surroundings of Jersey. I love these images; they align with many of the photographs that Luís and I have made on land and waterscapes over the last several years.

Untitled (Double Body), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.

Untitled (Double Face), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.

En Océanie, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1932.

I have recently discovered the work of feminist scholar Amelia Groom. Groom was in Jersey doing research on Cahun and Moore and wrote this:

Something I didn’t understand until I travelled here (Jersey) is that the Channel Islands sit in waters with an extremely dramatic tidal range—one of the most extreme in the world. The island of Jersey is said to double in size at low tide. I suppose you could also say that it halves in size at high tide. Or you could say, more accurately, that it has no fixed size or shape. Like Claude Cahun, this land mass is a continual shapeshifter, always spilling out from itself, and pulling veils up over itself, and calling its own edges into question.

Amelia Groom, In the ARMS of the SEA: CLAUDE CAHUN and MARCEL MOORE at the WATER’S EDGE, 2024.

An essential part of my art practice and process has been to study and research Cahun and Moore’s lives and works in books, catalogues and academic essays.

My Cahun/Moore library

I have been rereading Jennifer L. Shaw’s extensive (and fabulous) 2017 biography, Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun, focusing specifically on the chapter titled Spiritual Arms Instead of Firearms: Cahun and Moore on the Isle of Jersey,  which describes Cahun and Moore’s lives on Jersey from the late 1930s onward. Around 1936, Cahun started talking about leaving Paris permanently. Her health was fragile and she was, of course, well aware of rising anti-Semitism in France (Cahun’s father was Jewish) and the onslaught of fascism in Germany and beyond. Here Shaw describes Cahun’s thinking during this time:

She began to talk about a ‘physical and primordial need to live in the countryside’, and wanted to leave Paris. It was as if she felt her work there was done. Their ties to the city were finally torn asunder when Moore’s mother (Cahun’s stepmother) finally passed away. In a letter of 1951, Cahun explained that she felt ‘an extreme malaise, the premonition of danger’ at the end of 1936.

Shaw quotes Cahun:

The idea formed in my head, as soon as the death of my stepmother cut the last family tie. We had friends . . . a stable, comfortable, happy life. Suzanne didn’t want to leave: she didn’t like moving and thought that life in the countryside wouldn’t suit me as well as I imagined. . . . I proposed Jersey, knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to drag her any further.

Claude Cahun in François Leperlier, Claude Cahun: L’Exotisme Intérier (Paris, 2006), pp. 377-80, in Jennifer L. Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, pp. 199 -200.

In 1937, Cahun and Moore moved to Jersey permanently, leaving their high-profile lives in Paris. They reclaimed their given names, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe. (I will continue to use the names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore throughout this blog for consistency). The fact that they were stepsisters also gave them a ‘cover’ in this more provincial setting. With the death of Marcel’s mother, the Malherbe-Schwob family estate was settled, and they inherited enough money to buy a beautiful (and quite large) stone farmhouse, La Rocquaise, located right on St. Brelade’s Bay.

La Rocquaise, the home of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, c. 1938.

During these years prior to the German occupation in 1940, Claude and Marcel enjoyed the ocean, their garden and their lovely house full of artworks, books and family furniture. Several friends came from Paris to stay with them. However, as far as the local population was concerned, Cahun and Moore kept mostly to themselves. The islanders saw the ‘sisters’ as eccentric and bourgeois middle-aged women, who walked their cat, Kid, on a leash and sunbathed naked in their garden.

Cahun later wrote:

The illusion of holiday without end, a garden already in flower. It seemed that the only thing left to do was to become familiar with the trees, the birds, the doors, the windows and pulling from the clothing trunk the appropriate article, short or long, to dive into the sun and the sea.

Claude Cahun, ‘Letter à Gastone Ferdière,’ in Écrits, p. 665, in Jennifer L. Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, p. 203.

Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1939.

Cahun is doubled and reversed (again) on the horizon in the image above taken near La Rocquaise. They continued their photographic practice. Below are a few of my favorites from this period:

Untitled (Framed Face), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1938.

Untitled (Lying in the Garden), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1939.

Untitled (the Window), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1938.

Within this seemingly idyllic life on Jersey, Cahun and Moore were well aware of Hitler’s relentless march across Europe. You can read about Cahun and Moore’s life during WWII and after the war in Part Two: Pilgrimage to Jersey (and to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore) – Occupation and Resistance, Arrest and Jail, After the War in my blog post:

Part Two – Pilgrimage to Jersey (and to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore) – Occupation and Resistance, Arrest and Jail, After the War – posted in Boulder, CO. January 19th , 2026

Part Two – Pilgrimage to Jersey (and to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore) – Occupation and Resistance, Arrest and Jail, After the War – posted in Boulder, CO. January 19th , 2026

Map of the Channel Islands

In June of 1940, as German forces advanced through France and the rest of Europe, the British government deemed the Channel Islands indefensible. Consequently, they withdrew all military forces from the islands and disbanded the Royal Militias of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. The British hastily organized evacuations for the citizens of the islands. The evacuations prioritized women and children. Somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 people were evacuated. About one fifth of the population of Jersey was evacuated, roughly 6,500 citizens. Claude and Marcel decided to stay on Jersey.

On June 28, 1940, the Germans bombed St. Helier Harbor and La Roque Harbor on Jersey and St. Peter Port on Guernsey. The Germans began their occupation of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark on June 30 and stayed until liberation in May of 1945.

Occupation and Resistance

German soldiers on the beach from the window of La Rocquaise (with Kid the cat), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1940.

Claude was forty-five and Marcel was forty-seven when the German occupation began in Jersey. Their intent had been to retire to a quiet life on the island. However, with the German military literally at their front and back doors, they could not give up their ideals, sense of justice and humanity and their anti-fascist, anti-Nazi beliefs. Together, they undertook a unique campaign of resistance.

I have been rereading Claire Follain’s well-researched and excellent essay “Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe: Résistantes” in don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, a major catalogue produced by the Jersey Heritage Trust.

Follain describes some of Cahun and Marcel’s methodologies and their manufacture of anti-Nazi propaganda:

Malherbe utilized her fluency in German language to translate news taken from BBC radio broadcasts. Schwob converted the news to rhyme, conversation or other literary formats. These words were typed or handwritten onto one sheet of paper of approximately A5 or smaller. Over time, the tracts evolved in their style and presentation. Schwob used different colored inks and/or paper when it was available. Malherbe used her graphic art skills to add illustrations to Schwob’s words. Above all the format was altered to maintain interest. Schwob and Malherbe referred to these tracts as ‘unsere Zeitung’ (our newspaper). The intended implication was that these notes were written by an anti-Nazi German officer from within the occupying force. The notes showed evidence of education and were signed ‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (‘the Soldier with no Name’). The style of language and occasional grammatical error over the years eventually gave the reader the clue (as it did the Geheime  Feldpolizei, the Secret Field Police) that the authors were not native German speakers.

Claire Follain in “Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe:  Résistantes,” pp. 84-85, in don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore.

Propaganda tract and drawing, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1942.

 English translation of the German text on the drawing:

I believe in the end the waves
Devoured both sailor and boat
And that was brought about
By Adolf Hitler with his screaming

Most of these tracts and drawings were destroyed by the Germans. The Jersey archive holds some fifty of them. Cahun later recounted that she and Moore had made thousands of these messages over the four-year period, including carbon copies they could produce by the dozen.

Propaganda tract, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

English translation of the German text on the tract:

Hitler leads us …

Goebbels speaks for us …

Göring eats for us …

Ley drinks for us …

Himmler? Himmler murders for us …

But nobody dies for us!

Cahun and Moore were surrounded by the German military. Their home was in view of the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel, which was requisitioned by the Germans for use as a barracks and recreation center for German soldiers. German soldiers were frequently buried in the cemetery on the other side of La Rocquaise. In front of their home, along St. Brelade’s Bay, the Germans used the forced labor of POWs imported from the continent to build heavy fortifications as part of Hitler’s infamous Atlantic Wall.

Claude and Marcel assembled their DIY anti-Nazi propaganda materials in the dead of night in their upstairs bedrooms. They hid their (illegal) radio, their typewriter and all their writing materials in various locked cabinets upstairs. Even their housekeeper, Edna, was unaware of their activities. Cahun and Moore developed various strategies for distribution of their messages, meant for the German soldiers. They would take the bus into St. Helier, armed with shopping bags and ‘disguised’ as the two middle-aged ladies they were. They would place their anti-Nazi propaganda in cafés, on car windshields, and even in soldiers’ pockets. In newsstands and shops, they inserted their leaflets and messages in German magazines and newspapers. As the occupation wore on and tobacco was in short supply, they tucked messages in empty cigarette packets. The tracts often contained the phrase ‘Bitte verbreite,’ meaning ‘Please spread the word.’

Cahun later recounted:

We could not have been less remarkable: no hats; old beige walking shorts called jodhpurs, on the feet rubber boots called Wellingtons; a blouse of cotton or wool shirt, depending on the temperature, a semi-masculine jacket. When out walking or in town, a raincoat on top (a Burberry, thus a large number of pockets for our tracts); a scarf wrapped around the head . . . wool gloves in winter— and the shopping bag (as an alibi). We were peasants—and also daughters and wives of the bourgeoisie of the gentleman farmer type . . . my appearance and Suzanne’s differed little from the look of the majority of inhabitants of the island.

Claude Cahun, ‘Le Muet dans la melée,’ in Écrits, p. 627, in Jennifer L. Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, p. 212.

Cahun and Moore also took advantage of the fact that the cemetery was located beside their home. During the funerals for German soldiers, they would place their messages in German staff cars parked near their house. When Oberleutnant Zepernick was buried in 1943, Lucy and Suzanne waited for nightfall and placed a homemade cross on his grave with the words ‘Für sie ist der Kreig zu Ende,’ or ‘For him the War is Over,’ inscribed in Gothic lettering.

‘Für sie ist der Kreig zu Ende’ design, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1943.

Their messages took different forms. I particularly like the design of the typewritten tract below which begins with ‘Gewissensruhige Freiheit,’ or ‘Freedom with a Clear Conscience,’ followed by, “The Soldier Without a Name” works to bring this long-buried treasure to light in a calm and carefree manner, striving to understand and reduce the differences that exist between people.’ And goes on to say,  ‘Our revolution should be undertaken by everyone not just one person.’

Tract, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1944.

Cahun and Moore’s messages and interventions were intended as incitements for the German soldiers, encouraging them to contemplate their part in an unjust war. The signature ‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (The Soldier Without a Name) was not just a signature, for Cahun believed that she must take on the persona and thoughts of a German soldier who was resisting the war and occupation from within the ranks of the German military. After the war and occupation ended, Moore photographed Cahun as The Soldier Without a Name.

Cahun as The Soldier Without a Name, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

In Exist Otherwise, Jennifer L. Shaw writes:

What I find most striking about Cahun and Moore’s resistance work is that it is so consistent with the ideas and strategies that Cahun had used all throughout her artistic and literary career. Cahun refused to take an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ approach. Rather than seeing all Germans as enemies, she imagined that each individual soldier had the potential to reconsider his actions. She even realized this conviction by inhabiting the position of the enemy in the form of the ‘Soldier Without a Name,’ and spoke from that position, encouraging others to lay down their arms and join the resistance. This strong belief in a person’s ability to challenge and analyze one’s own actions, combined with Cahun’s and Moore’s wit and poetry, formed the basis of their activities. Like Cahun’s previous work, the guiding principles for these resistance activities were anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, aimed at defying binary thinking. (pp. 249-250)

For four long years, Marcel and Claude carried out their extremely risky mission, wholeheartedly and with great conviction, under the severe conditions of the German occupation. They understood the danger into which they had placed themselves and assumed they would be caught at some point. They had pledged to each other to commit suicide when and if caught and had collected large amounts of barbiturates for this purpose. They feared death less than the punishment of deportation to the camps in Continental Europe.

Arrest and Jail

On June 6, 1944, or ‘D-Day,’ the main Allied Forces carried out the largest seaborn invasion in history, landing in Normandy. This attack, in combination with airborne operations, began the liberation of France and Western Europe from the German forces and laid the ground for the victory of the Allied Forces and Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945.

German military morale on Jersey (and elsewhere) was necessarily at a low point in the summer of 1944. Cahun and Moore kept up their resistance activities. On July 25, 1944, Claude and Marcel had spent the day in St. Helier distributing their anti-war propaganda. They were at home that evening when five German secret police officers, members of the Geheime Feldpoizei (GFP), came to search their house. The GFP officers found the (illegal) radio and the portable typewriter used to create the tracts, as well as some of the materials Cahun and Moore had been distributing earlier that day. Cahun and Moore were arrested and taken to Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier. They managed to take the barbiturates they had stockpiled. They were both found unconscious in their cells and taken to the hospital. The dosage did not work.

Taken back to prison, Cahun and Moore endured more than nine months of incarceration in Gloucester Street Prison. They were kept in solitary confinement in separate cells. The conditions were difficult. Claude’s health, already fragile, suffered under these conditions. Marcel and Claude still feared the possibility of deportation to the camps more than they feared death by execution for their ‘crimes.’

Cahun and Moore were able to communicate with each other by passing notes through a secret system that the other prisoners had devised. The cells were divided by thick walls with ventilation tunnels connecting the cells. The prisoners were able to send notes through these tunnels attached to strings. This was a coordinated system, which shows the efforts and a certain amount of comradery amongst the inmates. Other materials were shared and passed around such as books, cigarettes and writing materials.

Sketch of the prison cell showing the ventilation ducts, Marcel Moore, 1944.

Cahun and Moore were interrogated by the GFP; they cooperated and provided details of their resistance activities and actions over the four years. As it turned out, the GFP had been collecting their tracts and resistance materials for a long time. However, the GFP did not think that these two middle-aged women were acting alone. The GFP were hoping that, through interrogation, they could identify the resistance organization or group behind these anti-Nazi tracts. Cahun later wrote:

In fact, the Gestapo searched in vain for four years. We had been able to avoid every search. It was so sudden. They would never have believed, despite their informers, that it had anything to do with us. Even with the proof in their hands, they couldn’t believe their eyes. They remained persuaded that we couldn’t have been anything more than accomplices . . . of X. In order to get them to stop interrogating us about our hypothetical affiliations with . . . X, or with the Intelligence Service (!!!), it was necessary to demonstrate to them that we were fully aware of and capable of our . . . ‘crimes.’

Cahun, ‘Le Muet dans la melée,’ p. 631, in Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, p. 226.

Cahun and Moore’s trial was on November 16, 1944. This was the first time that Cahun and Moore had been in the same room for any length of time since their capture in July. If nothing else, they were happy to be together in a warm room in comfortable chairs. The trial took five hours. There were three judges presiding, a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. The trial was conducted mostly in German. At one point Moore stated: ‘The defense is much more bitter against us than the prosecution.’

The GFP had found more incriminating materials at La Rocquaise to use for the trial. In addition to the radio and typewriter, they brought personal papers, anarchist pamphlets, anti-German books written by Cahun’s father and art works that Cahun and Moore had hidden. They also brought a revolver and camera equipment they had found.

During the trial, the court revealed excerpts from the tracts and works of resistance that the ‘Soldier Without a Name’ had produced and the GFP had collected (and which Cahun and Moore had already confessed to producing when interrogated).

After the trial, Cahun composed a testimony of what had taken place. Here she paraphrases what the judge, Oberst Samson, had stated at the trial:

You are francs-tireurs [partisans] … even though you used spiritual arms instead of firearms. It is indeed a more serious crime. With firearms, one knows at once what damage has been done, but with spiritual arms, one cannot tell how far-reaching it may be.

In Claire Follain’s “Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe: Réistantes,” p. 89, in don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore.

Oberst Samson had inadvertently complimented Claude and Marcel by using the term ‘spiritual arms’ to describe their brave and thoughtful resistance activities.

Cahun and Moore were convicted of creating propaganda ‘undermining the morale of the German forces’ and sentenced to death. They refused to sign letters of appeal to reverse their execution order and were sent back to prison. From November 16, 1944 until February 20, 1945, Cahun and Moore lived (in prison) under the threat of their imminent execution (and continued to refuse to make an appeal to their sentence, perhaps still fearing deportation to a camp more than death).

On February 20, 1945 Cahun and Moore were informed that the German High Command had granted a reprieve to their stay of execution. The French consulate and the Jersey bailiff had made appeals on their behalf. From that day until their release on May 8, 1945, Claude and Marcel were reunited (they were overjoyed) and shared a cell in the prison. Once reunited Claude and Marcel shared the secret notes they had both created on whatever materials they could muster (toilet paper, book pages, etc.). They sewed these notes in the lining of a coat which a friend smuggled out of the prison. Cahun later used these notes for the letters and accounts she wrote later to document their lives during the occupation.

Untitled (Cahun biting down on a Luftwaffe insignia), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, May 1945.

The image above shows Claude Cahun in May of 1945, soon after her release from prison. With her unique sense of humor (and resistance), she bites down on a Luftwaffe insignia that one of the German prisoners had given her.

After the War

For Claude and Marcel, the return to a ‘normal life’ after the war was no small feat. During their incarceration, the Germans had pillaged their home completely, stripping it bare of all furniture and their artwork. The Germans also stole artworks Cahun and Moore had collected, household items, books, clothing, mementos, even locks, keys and electrical wire.

Following the liberation, Cahun and Moore spent months rebuilding their home. They also had to search across the island for belongings that had been taken or given away by the Nazis. The Germans had also burned many of their artworks and resistance works before liberation. They found their French Bible and Cahun’s complete edition of Shakespeare at the Metropole Hotel. They managed to find other valuables and books as well; apparently, their library had been bought by a bookseller and sold to individual buyers across the island. Gradually, they put their lives back together.

Cahun and Moore sunbathing,1945.

Cahun continued to be outspoken about the war and the occupation and felt isolated and alienated from the islanders who had, albeit passively, aided and abetted the Nazis. Cahun worked on several written works (long letters, a memoir, prose) in the late forties and early fifties that recounted her and Moore’s experiences and their resistance during the occupation and their time in jail. She started the memoir titled Le Muet dans la melée,The Mute in the melée,based on her prison notes. She also worked on a text Confidences au Miroir, Confessions at the Mirror, comprised of poetic musings and autobiographical materials.

Cahun’s health had suffered during her imprisonment, and it did not improve afterward. Still, Claude and Marcel managed to create an enjoyable life on the island. They reinitiated their photographic practice together in and around their home. Cahun was again the main subject.

Untitled (Cahun as The Soldier Without a Name), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

Untitled (Cahun walking the cat), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1948

Untitled (Cahun in the cemetery), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

These images, taken during the last period of Cahun’s life, are telling for me. As an older artist, I relate to these images of Cahun. I haven’t suffered war and occupation as Cahun and Moore did, or fragile health as Cahun did. Yet, still, I relate to their often-tender observances of a life/lives (well lived) that happen with age: their joys, tragedies and triumphs. Cahun reappears as the Soldier Without a Name, smoking and grinning sardonically. Cahun walks their new cat, Nike, on a leash barefoot and blindfolded.She holds a blank mask up to her ghostlike figure in the cemetery.  All these images feature the cometary as a backdrop (is this again a lingering symbolist strategy?).

I love this series of images below, depicting Cahun walking along the sea wall with St. Brelade’s Bay in the background. She appears almost floating, free, unencumbered. Perhaps an elderly angel?

Untitled (Claude walking along the sea wall), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

Untitled (Claude walking along the sea wall), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.

Still, Marcel and Claude kept thinking of Paris, their old friends and a chance for a more stimulating cultural life than the island afforded. In 1953, they traveled to Paris with the intention of reestablishing a life there. They stayed in their old neighborhood and met with old friends. Cahun became ill in Paris, so they had to give up these plans and return to Jersey. In the fall of 1954, Cahun’s health declined further and she was taken to the hospital in St. Helier. She died there on December 8, 1954. Claude was sixty years old. Marcel buried her in the cemetery on St. Brelade’s Bay. Moore later sold ‘the Farm without a Name’ and moved to another house on Jersey. Marcel died by suicide in 1972. She was eighty years old. Marcel is buried beside Claude. Suzanne and Lucy lie in rest together on St. Brelade’s Bay.

Gravestone at St. Brelade’s Parish Church Cometary

There is so much more to Claude and Marcel’s story, and to the details of how their lives and works have been recovered, rediscovered, collected, interpreted and represented.

Wish me luck on my pilgrimage to Jersey. I leave on February 2nd.

As a postscript, I would like to say that the images on these blog posts have been scanned from the various books I have collected about Cahun and Moore. The Jersey Heritage holds many of these images in their archive. I hope to gain permission to obtain high resolution digital copies of some of these images. I also recommend that interested readers get a copy of Jennifer L. Shaw’s biography Exist Otherwise: The Lives and Works of Claude Cahun. Unfortunately, the catalogue produced by the Jersey Heritage Trust, don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, edited by Louise Downie, is out of print. Gen Doy’s Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography is also a fabulous resource.

I’m in training (with Claude Cahun)- posted July 30, 2025

“Don’t Kiss Me I,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

In February, I enacted a performance and embodiment practice with early-twentieth-century French artist Claude Cahun. This practice resulted in a direct transmission from Claude to me through Luís Branco’s magic camera.

Luís and I shot hundreds of images on the French Riviera at La Napoule Art Foundation. In the studio and in and around the beautiful Chateau de la Napoule, we created a body of work in conversation with Claude Cahun and her lifelong photographic practice, much of which was produced with her partner in art and life, Marcel Moore.

Cahun (1894 – 1954), a surrealist intellectual, was a significant, multitalented artist. She was a performance artist, photographer, sculptor and writer. She was also a committed, even jailed, anti-Nazi activist. Cahun was gender ambiguous, a lesbian and a cross-dresser. (I use she/her pronouns for Cahun; the gender-neutral pronouns they/them, while perhaps more appropriate, were not in use during Cahun’s lifetime.) Cahun’s work, in both photography and writing, explores the many masks of selfhood. Cahun encourages us to examine the theater of identity, where we perform and inhabit roles that are imposed upon us as well as roles that we invent. Claude Cahun is my queer superheroine.

Untitled, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.

The 1927 image of Cahun posing as a body builder (above) is one of my favorites in Cahun’s oeuvre. It plays on all sorts of tropes of identity and performance. The costume in the image is both masculine and feminine: the misplaced nipples and lips on the shirt, the delicate neck scarf and silk waist sash, the “I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME” message, the enormous dumbbell across her shoulders and the contrapposto stance that would never bear its weight. What is she in training for? The curlicue hair, the hearts on her cheeks and the dishtowels hung as a backdrop. It is all just plain funny and indicative of Cahun’s lifelong pursuit of “dressing up,” a pursuit she accomplished in her everyday life and in theater productions in Paris in the 1920s.  For my enactments of this image, assemblage artist Jensina Endresen helped me create my own body-builder costume. My partner, Jamie, constructed the inflatable barbells that I brought with me to France. Et voilà!

“Don’t Kiss Me II,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

“Don’t Kiss Me III,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

On a more serious note…


Untitled, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1928.

The photograph above, of Cahun standing beside a mirror, is eerily striking. The mirror doubles her image—the “real” Cahun gazes toward the camera and us, while the mirror image of Cahun looks into the mirror itself and beyond. Cahun’s gaze is deadpan, serious. Her hair is shorn, very butch or masculine—hommasse in French. The jacket and the gesture are also masculine. Cahun was always toying with ideas of self-reflection, self-questioning and gender ambiguity.

“Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

 – Claude Cahun, Disavowals, trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge: MIT Press 2007), 151. Originally in Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus, 1930.

“I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun I,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

In our triptych “I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun,” Luís and I did not attempt a direct copy of Cahun’s photograph. Instead of gazing sidelong, as Cahun does, I gaze directly into the mirror. The three photographs depict the process of me “performing” my more butch, more masculine self. I cut my hair short (then later cut it off entirely). In all three images, the water and horizon of the Mediterranean are visible through the windows. I donned a Cahun-inspired checked jacket and a mask. The costume and the setting allude to an art-deco-era past or early Hollywood. I will be showing this triptych in a group exhibition called “Queer Perspectives” at Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver opening July 31st and up through August 30, 2025.

“I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun II,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

“I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun III,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

“Que me veux tu?”  Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1929.

The double-headed image of Claude Cahun (above) is one of Cahun’s few titled photographs. “Que me veux tu?”, or “What do you want from me?”, speaks to Cahun’s never-ending existential struggle with and questioning of identity in her life and art

I had my head shaved at the beauty shop in La Napoule. It was kind of liberating. Luís shot a whole series of double exposures of this new hairless and quite androgynous “double me,” creating our own version of “What do you want from me?”

What do you want from me?” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

Untitled, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1920.

Marcel Moore must have taken this image (above) of Claude in her dandy and gentleman-like attire in the early 1920s in Paris. They were living a life that allowed Cahun to explore her gender ambiguity in full.

“Masked (after Claude Cahun),” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

As a Gentleman (after Claude Cahun), Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

Gilded, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.

I received a transmission from Claude Cahun during this intense period in France. This last image, which I call “Gilded,” is one of my favorites. This was taken during our last photoshoot at La Napoule. I had applied gold makeup to my face. Cahun’s golden light shines through me.

serious play with Claude Cahun – posted in Boulder, CO January 29, 2025

Claude Cahun Series (mask), black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2022.

Luís Branco and I shot the above image in a strange and beautiful hotel in Amsterdam in 2022, referencing French artist Claude Cahun’s 1928 masked image below.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1928.

I love this image of Cahun, taken by her partner Marcel Moore. Cahun is masked and naked, her gender identity obscured and conflated by the covering of her breasts and her closely cropped hair. Cahun, born Lucy Mathilde Schwob, refused and resisted a prescribed female identity from a young age, as did Moore, who was born Suzanne Malherbe. Despite her gender nonconformity, I will not refer to Cahun (or Moore) as “they” or “them,” as these gender terms were not in use during their lifetime. Cahun had her own take on gender, saying,

“Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

– Claude Cahun, Disavowels, trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 151. From Claude Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus, 1930.

In early February, I will begin a residency at La Napoule Art Foundation in southern France with Luís Branco. There, we will make new performative photographs in direct conversation with Claude Cahun’s portraits and photographs. This residency will offer me further opportunity for some serious play with this complex artist (and lots of costumes and in France to boot!). We are excited to work in the historic Château de la Napoule and the gardens and grounds of the La Napoule Art Foundation on the Côte d’Azur. American sculptor Henry Clew and his wife Marie bought this historic property in 1918 and actively redesigned and restored the château and gardens in the 1920s and 30s. They welcomed other American expatriates and European aristocrats into their home for lavish parties and cultural events. This is the same period of time when Claude Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore were active in the vibrant cultural life of Paris. In 1951 Marie Clew established the property as the La Napoule Art Foundation. The foundation welcomes artists from around the world for artist residencies, exhibitions and other cultural events.

Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954) has been my main muse over the last several years. Cahun’s remarkable self-portraits, with Marcel Moore (1892 – 1972) behind the camera, confirm her courage in exploring the fluidity of identity and gender. These images reveal Cahun in flux—as masculine and feminine, masked and masquerading. The images depict Cahun as a body builder, a buddha, a dandy, a she-devil and in other guises and manifestations.

Cahun and Moore’s collection includes photographs in ordinary settings: in their hometown in Nantes France; in glimpses of their life together in Paris in the twenties; and on Jersey (one of the Channel Islands located between England and France) where they lived before, during and after World War II. Postwar photographs of Cahun demonstrate the toll the war, the occupation of Jersey and her time in jail took on her health. Cahun and Moore both served time for their anti-Nazi activities during World War II. Cahun died in Jersey in 1954. Moore died in 1972.

Cahun and Moore’s photographs have been widely published, exhibited and heralded over the last thirty years. However, it is interesting to me that for Claude and Marcel, this was a private photographic practice. They exhibited very few of their photographs, though they did create remarkable photomontages together with many of these images for Cahun’s seminal 1930s surrealist monograph Aveux non Avenues, which has been translated and published in English as Disavowals.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1914.

My Claude / My Medusa, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2019.

Luís Branco and I shot the above image in the Netherlands at Foundation OBRAS. We were referencing the above black-and-white portrait of Claude Cahun. Here, Cahun rests her head on a pillow, her hair billowing out around her face; she gazes, wide-eyed, directly toward the camera. The image was undoubtedly made in collaboration with Moore when Cahun was eighteen years old.

I was sixty-four when Luís and I reenacted this photograph more than 100 years later. As I lay on the pillow and performed for the camera, I pondered my life alongside Cahun’s—my teens and her teens, my twenties and her twenties, and onward into our thirties, forties, and fifties. Cahun died at the age of sixty. My performative practice with Luís Branco is both serious and playful, kindred to Cahun’s lifelong photographic practice with Marcel Moore. A transmutation occurs between my and Luís’s work and Marcel and Claude’s work. My reaction when I saw our images was, “Oh, my god, I look like Medusa!”

Under Cahun’s influence, I am compelled to delve into the ambiguities of my own identity, to explore definitions of gender and to examine the tropes of selfhood I inhabit. What is masculine and what is feminine? Are gender and sexuality performative? What lurks behind the masks we wear? Below are several of my favorite images of Cahun’s (and Moore’s). These images produced over Cahun’s lifetime and many more will serve as inspirations for my own embodiments and performative photographs.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1921.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1921.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.

Cahun’s images as a body builder are some of my favorites. Assemblage artist Jensina Endreson (check out her fabulous work at https://www.bustleworshipdesigns.com/ ) has been helping me with my body-builder costume, complete with a T-shirt like Cahun’s, embroidered with the text, “I’m in training. Don’t kiss me.”

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun, 1927.

Cahun and Moore were associated with several avant-garde theater groups in Paris in the twenties. The image of Cahun as the Buddha is thought to document her involvement with the theater group Les Amis des Arts Esoteriques. Luís and I reincarnated this Buddha image in Holland in 2022 and some curious images emerged.

Claude Cahun Series (Buddha), color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2022.

Claude Cahun Series (Buddha), color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2022.

Que me veux tu? What do you want from me?,  black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.

The composite photo above is one of Cahun’s few images with a title: Que me veux tu? What do you want from me?. The image and title reflect her lifelong questioning of self and identity in words and images.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun, 1929.

The image above documents Cahun’s performance as the Devil in a production of the medieval play The Mystery of Adam. I have enlisted seamstress Laura Simmons to make this fabulous art deco costume and Jamie to make the wings. Voilà!

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1932.

Many of Cahun and Moore’s images, performed in domestic settings, project the idea of serious play, which they regularly enacted in their photographic practice.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1938.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1938.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1939.

These images from the late thirties were taken after Cahun and Moore had moved permanently to Jersey island from Paris.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), May 1945.

The image above was taken days after Cahun and Moore were released from jail in Jersey in May of 1945. Cahun, ever resistant, bites down on the German Luftwaffe insignia. Fifty-one years old at the time, she appears much older. Few photographs have survived from the period during World War II, when Cahun and Moore were living under the occupation on Jersey and actively resisting the war and the occupation in covert actions. They were caught in 1944 and sentenced to death and were in jail for almost a year. Luckily, the war ended, and they were released. During their time in jail, their home was dismantled, their art and book collections stolen, their furniture possessed by the Germans. They lost so much. They gradually put their life and their home back together. Neither Claude nor Marcel ever returned to Paris—Claude’s health problems prohibited it.

Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1947.

“If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of the next war. If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations. If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive.” – Claude Cahun

Cahun and Moore’s artworks, photographs, writings, texts and memoirs have been collected and archived in the Jersey Heritage Museum in St. Helier, Jersey.

For more information on Cahun’s life and practice, you can read “A Brief Biography of Claude Cahun” posted on this blog:

A brief biography of Claude Cahun – posted in Boulder, CO, April 22, 2021

I also recommend these two books:

Paper Bullets, Jeffrey H. Jackson. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2020.

Historian Jeffrey Jackson focuses primarily on Cahun and Moore’s anti-Nazi activities during World War II. He includes lots of interesting details about their life on Jersey island, their activism and imprisonment.

Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun, Jennifer L. Shaw. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.

Art Historian Jennifer Shaw has written a comprehensive treatise on Cahun and Moore’s lives and works. This is a great book.

Slide Show Side Show – posted in Boulder, CO Dec 27, 2024

Sleeping Venus, presumably started by Giorgione and finished by Titian, c. 1510, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.

let’s shoot by the small rock

horizontal landscape womanscape

last light first light works better

Giorgione or was it Titian? What were you thinking?

red satin resting, arm akimbo

eyes closed eyes open

naked, nude except the wig

cover crotch with hand

is she playing, sleeping?

focused, the relationship understood

Aphrodite / Venus series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

Aphrodite / Venus series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

my angels / my goddesses arrive

the studio prepared, black cloth

the mirror, always the mirror

a blond but really silver

no butt crack

except for Eros / Cupid / Marta

the slim curves of their buttocks

my broad curving backside

blond Venus in the mirror

or is it Aphrodite?

why do they call her Venus?

Venus is also Ishtar’s star

this image is important to me

he shoots over and over

changing the lights, the lens, his distance

I look in the mirror back at him, the lens

Aphrodite / Venus series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

Aphrodite / Venus series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

it’s raining

we move to the casa

coffee, wine, special cheese

we try shooting in the small bedroom

Aphrodite rising attended by the Horae,

it doesn’t really work

we end up together in the bed

enveloped by my goddesses

in the morning we return to the rock

we dance, sing, smoke cigarettes

he keeps shooting

maybe some good ones

the three goddesses

Aphrodite / Venus series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

Aphrodite / Venus series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

sun comes up, last shots

more coffee

my Horae / Angels / Goddesses depart

keep to the schedule

time for my other goddess Inanna / Ishtar

golden horns, the two lions, lapis necklace

Inanna / Ishtar series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

early morning at Evoramonte

moon almost full

settling down

my lioness supports me

it’s fucking windy cold

Inanna / Ishtar series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

dawn arrives

a rainbow vista from the top of the mountain

my lioness near

I / Inanna / Ishtar stand strong

Inanna / Ishtar series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

last night

in the studio

Ishtar with our golden girdle

Angels of Light on repeat

I hold my breasts

full frontal don’t move

I am the goddess

the lights the lens

a meditation…

Inanna / Ishtar series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

Inanna / Ishtar series, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2024.

I wrote the text above, “Slide Show Side Show,” after returning from the OBRAS Artist Residency in Portugal in late October. The text describes a bit of the process (which can be both improvisational and painstaking) that Luís Branco and I go through during our photoshoots–this last time with my heroines Aphrodite / Venus and Inanna / Ishtar. Marta Leon and Marta Carocinho stood by as Aphrodite / Venus’ Horae (goddesses of the seasons and of time). Wilma Geldof and Jacinta Ganso assisted as Inanna / Ishtar’s lionesses. After returning from Portugal, I let the work “rest” for several weeks. During the last part of November and early December I went through the editing process (with Luís’ help). I looked through the hundreds of images we shot to select the images we want to produce. Ron Landucci has done the final corrections to the images and is currently printing the proofs. I am very happy with this last body of work and I am now preparing to embody Claude Cahun in February at the La Napoule Art Foundation in France with Luís.

Wishing you the best for the New Year.

Naked and Adorned Part I : Inanna and Ishtar – posted in Boulder, CO Nov 8, 2024

WIP—Inanna / Ishtar series, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

I almost retitled this blog post  “F__K THE PATRIARCHY: Part I: Inanna and Ishtar and Part II: Aprhodite and Venus”. I am posting this after the election… but I decided to go with my original title “Naked and Adorned Parts I and II.  I’ve been home from Portugal for more than a week and I have been looking over the images Luís Branco and I produced during our residency at OBRAS. No final edits—just a quick look through and a consideration of my most recent heroines, Inanna and Ishtar, and my long-term heroine, Aphrodite, and her reincarnation as Venus (they are considered in Part II).

For the HEROINES project I have researched and embodied several ancient goddesses and made performative photographs with Luís over the last four years. These goddesses include the Greek goddess / enchantress / sorceress Circe, from Homer’s The Odyssey, with her tamed lions and the men she transformed into swine; Isis, the great Egyptian goddess of motherhood, fertility and magic; and Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and sexuality and more …, who morphs into the Roman goddess Venus. These goddesses fascinate me for their special powers and independence and agency. They are all sexy, badass goddesses.

These goddesses of ancient times were also syncretic: They merged into one another and through one another across time, cultures, wars, land and water. Aphrodite, my original favorite goddess, has pointed me backward in time to her early predecessor / sister goddesses of love and sexuality (and much more …) in ancient Mesopotamia—Inanna and Ishtar.

My preparation for embodying all of these goddesses includes an exploration of thousands of years of representations, descriptions and depictions of them. I am not a historian, an academic or an archeologist, but I do my own intuitive investigations and excavations of these archetypal heroines.

In this current inquiry and recent embodiments, I have ventured to the East (in my mind and in my research) to the lands and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, to find ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna and Akkadian / Babylonian goddess Ishtar. These two goddesses merged over a period of a few thousand years (ca. 4000 BCE to 500 BCE) and are, at times, indistinguishable. Artifacts, texts and poems represent these amazing and powerful goddesses of love, sexuality, war (and much more …). Studying these ancient goddesses has been a revelation. Patriarchal Western European history has largely ignored them.

Radiant Inanna, cylinder seal, Mesopotamia, Akkadian period, ca. 2334 – 2154 BCE, h. 4 cm, d. 2 cm. The Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago.

In the two images of the ancient cylinder seal terracotta plate above, Inanna / Ishtar stands triumphantly in full regalia with one foot upon the back of her roaring lion. She wears a headdress of multiple horns. Weapons issue from her shoulders, while enormous wings appear from behind her back, suggesting both her martial and supernatural nature. An eight-pointed star, emblem of her manifestation as Venus, the morning and evening star, appears in the sky beside her.

WIP—Inanna / Ishtar series, black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

Known as the “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” Inanna is the goddess of love, war, fertility, political power, sex (and much more …). She was worshipped as early as 4000 BCE in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. In later Babylonian culture (2000 BCE to 500 BCE), Inanna becomes Ishtar and represents many of the same attributes and mythoi and is represented in many poems and hymns.

Terracotta plaque showing the goddess Ishtar (Inanna), 19th – 17th century BCE, from Iraq. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany.

On the terracotta plaque above, Ishtar / Inanna stands on the back of a lion. She holds a bow in her left hand and a crook or a sickle in her right. The symbol of the god Shamash (Utu) appears in the upper right corner. The scene seems to take place in mountainous terrain.

I constructed her gown and collected golden horns, a lapis necklace and a golden girdle for my embodiment of Inanna / Ishtar. My friend Antonio made a wooden bow for us. My lioness, Jacinta, accompanied Luís and me to the top of Evoramonte near dawn, just as the moon was setting.

WIP—Inanna / Ishtar series, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

Both Inanna and Ishtar have been portrayed in various states of nakedness and adornment, all of which evoke their power and their sexuality. They are invincible goddesses and sexy, graced with elaborate crowns and jewels, often portrayed full-frontal in sculpture or other artifacts, whether nude or adorned. Their states of dress and undress reflect cultural ideas about female sexuality and female power, essentially equating the two. Which of course I love! Many Mesopotamian sculptures depict Inanna / Ishtar, as well as other women, holding their breasts—not as a statement of modesty, but, rather, referring to their potent and powerful sexuality.

Ishtar from Susa, 1500 – 1100 BCE. Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

WIP – Inanna / Ishtar series, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

In addition to sculptures and plaques, Inanna / Ishtar is depicted in texts and poems. I have been reading translations of these texts in Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. “The Descent of Inanna” is the most famous text. Here, Inanna descends into the underworld through seven gates. At each gate, she must give up an article of clothing or an object that signifies one of her various powers—her horned crown, her scepter, her lapis jewelry, her robe. Finally, she is naked in the colorless underworld alongside her sister, Ereshkigal, who is the goddess of death and the underworld. Ultimately, Ereshkigal and the seven judges of the underworld kill Inanna. Her corpse is hung on a hook on the wall and left to decompose. Yet Inanna contrives a way to return to the living world: She consigns her husband, Dumuzi, the shepherd /king, and her faithful servant to spending half of every year in the underworld for eternity. Inanna is definitely a badass, but she has other sides as well; her sexual powers are prodigious.

Perhaps my favorite text about Inanna is the very sexy “The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi”:

Inanna spoke:

“What I tell you,

Let the singer weave into song.

What I tell you,

Let it flow from the ear to mouth,

Let it pass from old to young:

My vulva, the horn,

The Boat of Heaven,

Is full of eagerness like the young moon.

My untilled land lies fallow.

As for me, Inanna,

Who will plow my vulva?

Who will plow my high field?

Who will plow my wet ground?

As for me, the young woman,

Who will plow my vulva?

Who will station the ox there?

Who will plow my vulva?”

Dumuzi replied:

“Great Lady, the king will plow your vulva.

I, Dumuzi the King, will plow your vulva.”

Inanna:

“Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!

Plow my vulva!”

(From Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, 1983, Harper Perennial: New York, NY, pp. 36 – 37.)

Terracotta Couple from Susa, 1500 – 1100 BCE. Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Please read my blog post “Naked and Adorned Part II: Aphrodite and Venus” about our work made during the same time period at OBRAS, also part of the F__K the Patriarchy series…

Naked and Adorned Part II: Aphrodite and Venus – posted in Boulder, CO Nov 8 2024

The Birth of Venus, Alexandre Cabanel, 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

The 19th century painting above of the birth of Venus  by Cabanel in the Musée d’Orsay is monumental, 7 1/2 feet wide. I have not reincarnated this painting (yet). I know it is sexist but still fabulous. I am moving all around in time and geography from ancient Sumer and Babylonia (with the goddesses Inanna and Ishtar) to ancient Greece and the island of Cyprus, sometime around 1000 to 800 BCE, when the Greek goddess Aphrodite rose out of the Mediterranean as a fully formed and most beautiful goddess. Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, love (ALL LOVE), passion, pleasure (and much more …), has been a favorite goddess of mine for years. She is a primal goddess. I choose the story of her birth out of the sea as portrayed in Hesiod’s Theogony (written 8th – 7th century BCE), and I have written about it on my blog. Here is an excerpt:

“This is quite the elemental image and idea—beautiful Aphrodite emerges fully formed, born of Ouranus’s castrated giant genitals. The ‘foam’ from which Aphrodite arises is the semen of her father, Ouranus the god of the Sky. Her half-brother Chronos is the perpetrator of this heinous deed, castrating his own father at the bequest of his Mother Earth (Gaia). Aphrodite is gestated in this matrix / fluid of her father’s testes. She arises from the sea foam / seminal fluid with her two companions: Eros, the primordial god of Love and Sex, and Himeros, god of uncontrollable and ravishing Desire. One of Aphrodite’s Greek names is Philommedes which means both ‘genital loving’ and ‘smile loving.’”

 So-called “Ludovisi Throne,” Thasian marble, Greek artwork, ca. 460 BC (authenticity disputed). Museo Nationale Romano of Palazzo Altemps, Rome.

The ancient sculpture above (perhaps) presents Aphrodite rising from the sea, this time assisted by the Horae, goddesses of time and the seasons who are said to have been the first to dress and adorn Aphrodite.

My goddesses met Luís and me at OBRAS a few weeks ago to assist us. Here are two of our early-morning shots. We danced, sang and smoked cigarettes, the fun goddesses.

Works in Progress – Aphrodite and the Horae series, color digital images, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

Cnidus Aphrodite, Roman copy after a Greek original of the 4th century BCE, marble. Original elements: torso and thighs; restored elements: head, arms, legs and support (drapery and jug). Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Altemps, Rome.

While the Horae were the first to dress Aphrodite, the famed Greek sculptor Praxiteles (ca. 300 BCE) was the first to (almost) fully undress her. The Cnidus Aphrodite, also known as the Aphrodite of Knidos, above is one of the many Roman copies of the original statue made by Praxiteles around 350 BCE. Praxiteles’s sculpture of Aphrodite was the first fully nude Greek sculpture of a woman (or a goddess). Greek artists had been making nude sculptures of men for centuries before. This Aphrodite is monumental—more than six feet tall—and it was reproduced and copied for many centuries all over the Mediterranean and beyond in different sizes and shapes. Copies of this statue and its kin are displayed in museums and collections all over the world. This sculpture also marks the invention of the Venus Pudica gesture, where the figure covers her pubic area with her hand (apparently a gesture of modesty). This gesture has appeared throughout time in paintings and sculptures. Does it suggest modesty? Or is it an alluring gesture, a sign of welcome? This representation diverges markedly from the representations of our proud Mesopotamian goddesses of love and sexuality (and much more …) Inanna and Ishtar.

“Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex.” (Hélène Cixous, 1978: 255)

 “‘Alas! alas! Where did Praxiteles see me naked?’, Aphrodite is said to have exclaimed upon seeing her own image in Knidos. In antiquity just as today Praxiteles’ Knidian Aphrodite was celebrated as the first realistic depiction of the nude female body. It was this particular Aphrodite statue that first presented to us the ‘Classical female beauty’ or the aesthetically ideal form of the female body. Indeed, the image of nude Aphrodite has become equated with high art, and seen as a sign for aesthetics not only for ancient Greece but also for the rest of Western art and culture. This archetype of femininity has become so ingrained in Western aesthetics that it has been placed in the position of a paradigm against which images from earlier and later periods and cultures are evaluated with regard to the degree that they approach, resemble, or fail to follow this ideal.”

(From Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia by Zainab Bahrani,from the chapter “That Obscure Object of Desire: Nudity, fetishism, and the female body,” pg. 70)

Jumping forward to the Renaissance, the many paintings and representations of Aphrodite and Venus were influenced by Greek and Roman ideals and representations of the goddess and of the female nude. It was a Western European sexist racist fad that has lasted about 600 years and counting.

Sleeping Venus, perhaps begun by Giorgione and finished by Titian, ca. 1510. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.

The “Sleeping Venus” is believed to have been started by Giorgione at the end of his life and completed by Titian. The landscape is very Titianesque. This was apparently the first reclining nude of the Renaissance, and it launched the genre of the semi-erotic mythological pastoral. Venus is apparently unaware of our gaze. Again, is she modestly covering herself, or is she stroking herself??

Works in Progress – Venus series, color digital images, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

Luís and I made a series of images of Venus in the landscape at OBRAS-Portugal a few weeks ago, with the reclining nude (and the rock!). I haven’t chosen final versions (of any of our recent images). I like the crouching Venus above or maybe she’s a cougar Venus.

Venus in Front of the Mirror, Peter Paul Rubens, 1614-1615. Liechtenstein. The Princely Collection.

The Rubens painting above, “Venus in Front of the Mirror,” portrays a seventeenth-century Western European sensibility surrounding sex, gender, race and power. The very blond and white Venus is flanked by a black female servant, who tends her golden tresses, and Cupid, who holds up her mirror. The goddess of love and sexuality looks outward from the mirror, very much aware of the viewers who gaze upon her. Her power rests in her recognition of her own beauty and sexuality and the effect of both upon the viewer.

I both love and question Rubens’s “Venus in Front of the Mirror,” as it relates to the HEROINES project and my work in general. For months before leaving for Portugal, I had envisioned myself embodying this same Venus in a performative photograph. I bought a blond wig, and I arranged to have my friends / models / goddesses from the Cortiço Artist Residency come work with Luís and me at OBRAS to create this image. When I first arrived at OBRAS several weeks ago, I ventured to the Saturday market in Estremoz and found an almost-perfect antique mirror. I imagined myself looking out of the mirror of Venus, my late-sixty-something-year-old body (and face) exposed. In so doing, I am reflecting upon the ways in which women’s sexuality has been represented (and misrepresented) over time and how my own sexuality and body consciousness are expressed. Making this image was and is empowering. It’s also a little scary to expose myself in all these nude images. My friends and models, Marta and Marta, my beautiful (younger) goddesses, support me in my vulnerability. This is both a technical image and a poetic image. Luís did a beautiful job with the lighting and the composition.

WIP – Venus in Front of the Mirror, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, October 2024.

I am back at home now and posting this after the election. I have been writing and thinking about these goddesses and female power and our bodies and ALL of our rights that are now in great peril. F__K THE PATRIARCHY. We must mobilize, be warriors for the rights of ALL people.

Made in Portugal at the OBRAS Artist Residency – posted Sept 19, 2024 in Boulder, CO

 Woman Standing, Still, black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2015.

Woman Standing, Still, above, is one of my favorite images that I made with photographer Luís Branco during my first trip to Portugal and to the OBRAS Artist Residency in the fall of 2015.  She (I) stands with her feet planted firmly on the ground, on the mountain of Evoramonte, with the spacious sky surrounding her (me). She (I) is obviously an older woman and a strong matriarchal archetype.

I am preparing to return to Portugal in October, to the OBRAS Artist Residency near Evoramonte in the Alentejo region of Portugal. This place is very special to me, as are the people I have met at OBRAS, especially the residency’s founders, Carolien van der Laan and Ludger van der Eerden. I am feeling sentimental and grateful for the work I have accomplished with photographer Luís Branco over the last nine years at OBRAS. I am posting ten of my favorite images here, all of which were made at OBRAS and in nearby Evoramonte, and which convey the special affinity I have for this place. Luís and I have produced A LOT of work over the last several years at OBRAS and at other residencies and places in Portugal and Holland, and we have been showing our work in both Portugal and the US all along the way. You can see more of this work on my website.

It all began in the fall of 2015, when I traveled to Portugal and to OBRAS as a resident for the first time. At the time, I was studying the work of the fabulous Portuguese conceptual and performance artist Helena Almeida (1934 – 2018). Inspired by Almeida, my intention in 2015 was to make performative photographic artworks with myself as the subject. I asked Ludger and Carolien to introduce me to a photographer with whom I could work while I was at OBRAS. They introduced me to Luís Branco, and we began working together, in the studio, across the hills and fields surrounding OBRAS and in and around the nearby castle of Evoramonte. Woman Standing, Still, above, is (still) one of my favorite images from that first work period with Luís in 2015.

Woman in the Pego do Sino, black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2016.

I returned to OBRAS in the fall of 2016 to work with Luís once again. We spent time in the Pego do Sino (Canyon of the Bells), a magical canyon near OBRAS. In Woman in the Pego do Sino, above, I am swathed in black gauzy fabric, almost hidden in the rocky landscape. The black form of my body appears like an entrance into the earth. During this residency, Carolien and Ludger offered to curate a show of Luís and my works to date in the beautiful palácio in the nearby town of Estremoz. Following is a seven minute video that we made with videographer Rui Fernandez about that exhibition, REENCONTRANDO-A / MEETING HER AGAIN: An exhibition of Sherry Wiggins with Luís Branco, which took place in early 2017:

In the fall of 2017, I returned to OBRAS to work with Luís in various land and waterscapes. We made many images at different sites in the Alentejo: in canyons, in rivers, in lakes and in dry reservoirs. The title of the image below, Encarnado, refers to multiple things in Portuguese. Encarnado literally means the color red, but it also refers to the incarnation of another being. We made this image in the bottom of Pego do Sino, the dwelling place of a fierce goddess/deusa, according to my Portuguese friends.

Encarnado, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2017.

Encarnado was in the exhibit “Delirium” curated by Mark Sink at Redline Contemporary Art Center, Denver, CO, 2019. (photo by Robert Kitilla)

I returned to OBRAS-Portugal in the spring of 2019 to work with Luís yet again. Below are just a few of my favorite images from that time. These works demonstrate our continued connection with the landscape near OBRAS.

Woman, Rising, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2019.

Seat at Evoramonte, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2019.

I love Outside Woman, the black-and-white image below. Luís is shooting from inside the Casa Miradouro (the little house I stay in at OBRAS), and I am standing outside, swathed in a gauzy nude colored fabric, like a phantom goddess/ghost. The mountain of Evoramonte is visible in the background.

Outside Woman, black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2019.

In 2021, Luís and I initiated our ongoing Heroines Project at OBRAS-Portugal. For this project, I have been researching and embodying various biblical, historic, literary and mythical female figures, and Luís has been photographing me. Our first heroines were the biblical figures Eve and Salome. Exit Paradise, below, was inspired by Eve’s banishment from paradise and includes a gorgeous marmeleira, or quince tree, which is located in the courtyard at OBRAS.

Exit Paradise I, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2021.

Exit Paradise I and II, installation at Seidel City, Boulder, CO, 2023. (photo by Robert Kitilla)

And I love the black-and-white image Salome at Sunset, below, with the mountain of Evoramonte in the background at sunset. These works, and many more, were shown in Boulder in 2023 as a part of the fabulous exhibit Exit Paradise at Seidel City.

Salome at Sunset II, black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2021.

In spring of 2022, we put up The Mirror Between Us, a gorgeous exhibit in Evora, Portugal, curated by Ludger and Carolien. Margarida Branco and the municipality of Evora supported this exhibit, which was held in the beautiful Igreja de São Vicente in the center of Evora. This exhibit highlighted twenty-five performative photographs that Luís and I made in the Portuguese landscape between 2015 and 2019. The exhibit was originally scheduled for 2020 but was delayed due to covid. More than 4,000 people visited the exhibit over a two-month period. You can read about this exhibit and see the images on my blog:

https://sherrywigginsblog.com/2022/04/26/%EF%BF%BCwalk-through-the-exhibition-and-the-inauguration-of-the-mirror-between-us-at-the-igreja-de-sao-vicente-

Our work on the Heroines Project has progressed over the last few years at different locations in Portugal and Holland. In March of 2024, we were able to work for a few days at OBRAS-Portugal and at the Café O Emigrante in Evoramonte, and we shot some wonderful images of my heroine the Greek goddess Circe (from Homer’s The Odyssey) with several of our friends posing as Circe’s lioness companions and as Circe’s swine. In The Odyssey, Circe famously transforms Odysseus’s men into swine and later restores them to human form.

Circe and Her Companions, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2019.

Circe at the Bar, black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco, 2024.

As you can see, our work has become more theatrical with the Heroines Project. In October, Luís and I will be working at OBRAS-Portugal again. We will revisit my heroine Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty and sexuality (and more …). We will also represent the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar (also a goddess of love, sexuality and war and more …). I am thrilled to be returning to OBRAS-Portugal, a place of incredible inspiration and productivity for me, and I am grateful for my creative partnership with photographer Luís Branco that emerged at OBRAS and continues to flourish.