Photographs by Andy Keate, courtesy of Gasworks, London.

Inert being is a set of 28 identical soy wax tablets, showing the image of a bouquet of flowers in counter-relief. Throughout the exhibition Female Executioner at Gasworks, London, one of these tablets was mounted (at roughly face height) on a Unicol pole in an open doorway, while the other 27 were stacked against a wall. They were rotated daily. In Monsieur Venus: a Materialist Novel (1884) by Rachilde, Raoule de Vénérande sends her mistress Jacques Silvert a bouquet of immaculate white flowers daily. He is scared to think why they are white, and why they are immaculate: perhaps because, unlike an actress who puts red flowers in her ante-room five days a month, he does not menstruate, and is constantly available to his suitor.

As installed in Female Executioner at Gasworks, London, in January 2017, this work was the first thing a visitor saw. Beyond it was a white room in which the video work Adulteress (2017) and the print work Miserable wretch (2017) appeared. Beyond that, through the missing doors of the gallery entrance, transplated awkwardly into a deeper aperture of the space, was a woad-blue room which contained the knife-drawn text Stone breaker (2017) and the sculptural work Wax figure (2017).