Jo Spence in collaboration with Rosy Martin.

Set of 8 images mounted in pairs by the artist onto graph paper.

Jo Spence has written of this work:

"The work presented here on my taboo sexuality (another shame scenario) is only one tiny fragment of my journey through therapy, which has been partly talking, partly dancing and making noise, partly making drawings and paintings, partly constructing and inhabiting images of my various selves.

In working with Rosy Martin since 1983 we have evolved the practice of synthesising photographic and therapeutic skills into what we have since termed photo therapy. Our work is an intervention into the field of health and education, since it engages with the institutionalised mind and body split of western culture. Photo therapy can offer ways of making visible repressed memories, conflicts, fantasies, traumas, desires and losses and is the embodiment of various outward gazes coupled with penetrating forms of self interrogation. A kind of dialogue from within, a theatre of the self in which the psychic and the social finally meet each other. Most of the work remains totally private, but occasionally I feel safe enough to share it with others. Thus the work moves from being part of an ongoing process (the taking of many pictures), through into a series of interior dialogues and transformations after my viewing the pictures, into finally becoming potential raw material for public work. In Libido Uprising (which is part of my ongoing work on the mother and daughter relationship) I have endeavoured to enact interior metaphors for my conflict between the domestic and the erotic, between my image of my non-sexual mother and that part of myself which is still coming into being. At the beginning of a session I have very little idea what I am trying to tell myself, but by the time the interaction between the sitter/director (myself and photographer/therapist Rosy Martin, and latterly, David Roberts) has become a series of narrative fragments, I have a much clearer idea of what I am hearing, and then seeing. In the making of the pictures and the telling of the story I often become aware that 'that is not want I meant' ... and the whole process starts again. Sometimes I am amazed at how much I have unmasked in the making of the work; other times it is a jumping-off point for going deeper, or moving sideways into new fragments of memory."

Jo Spence, Rosy Martin and David Roberts "Libido Uprising. Mother / Daughter Work". This text was originally published in the group exhibition catalogue Exploring the Unknown Self: Self Portraits of Contemporary Women, Tokyo Museum of Photography, Tokyo, 1991. It is reproduced in Jo Spence MacBa, 2005, pp.355-57.