Bedfellow

Over the past five years, Caroline Tompkins has been making images of her sexual desires and fears. Her forthcoming book, Bedfellow explores the relationship sex has with pleasure and danger. It holds two truths at all times desiring men while fearing them. What makes Bedfellow a body of work that can be felt in the body is the way Tompkins uses the power dynamics of binary gender constructs to capture a kind of primal vulnerability, one that transcends gender: the inherent risk of walking around soft creatures in a hard world. Soft vs. hardthe dichotomy can be found in nearly every frame, two opposing forces simultaneously coexisting and threatening each other. Gideon Jacobs