Pissing Women: Three Decades On, Still Soaking the Pedestals of Power.

Some revolutions start with manifestos. Others start with puddles.

In 1995, Sophy Rickett and her collaborators transformed London into a urinal for feminist resistance. Clad in sober corporate suits, they staged public urination outside MI6, on Vauxhall Bridge, and in the City’s gleaming thresholds of marble and glass. It was not a prank, nor a drunken antic - it was theatre with bodily fluids as medium, aimed at the architecture of power.

The act was radical precisely because it was banal. Men had been casually marking territory on London’s pavements for centuries - pissing their way through history as if the streets belonged to them. For women, urination was meant to be hidden, discreet, ideally invisible. Rickett weaponised that double standard. Standing rather than squatting, gazing intently at the arc of piss on her Mary Janes, her figures appropriated the most brazen of male gestures and reframed it as feminist détournement. The message was clear: if men can claim space with a stream, so can we.

Some pictures don’t whisper, they dare you to double-take. This one? Let’s just say it’s not playing by the rules.

This was mid-90s London, a city in the throes of corporatisation, privatisation, and surveillance. Canary Wharf had risen from the Docklands, security cameras sprouted like weeds, and financial services were becoming the city’s new religion. Against this backdrop, Rickett’s Pissing Women were both absurd and devastatingly precise: infiltrating zones of authority with an act that no CCTV operator or marble lobby was designed to accommodate.

Rickett wasn’t alone in her nocturnal interventions. Rut Blees Luxemburg, her collaborator, turned her lens toward the social atmospheres surrounding these performances. Her Chance Encounters distilled the eerie stillness of streets after the interventions - the residues of defiance hanging in sodium-lit air. She also documented the playful side of subversion, staging conversations with corporate night-shift workers, slipping art into the overlooked margins of a 24-hour city. Together, Rickett and Luxemburg formed a tag team: one pissing on the edifice of power, the other capturing its quiet recoil.

Their collaboration was first exhibited in a makeshift space on the 16th floor of a high-rise off City Road - itself a sly reversal of power, looking down at the same financial district they had just soaked. What seemed like irreverence in the 90s now reads as prescience: a reminder that urban space is never neutral, always contested, and often policed through the most intimate of codes - gender, behaviour, bodies.

Fast forward to 2025. London is shinier but no freer. Streets are privatised by developers, every corner stares back with CCTV, and “acceptable” behaviour remains firmly gendered. Which is why Pissing Women, returning to Cob Gallery in Stream, still lands with force. Three original images from the series are joined by a previously unseen shot of Vauxhall Bridge, alongside Luxemburg’s vintage Chance Encounters prints and London - A Modern Project, High Rise - the same image immortalised as the cover of The Streets’ debut album. What began as guerrilla performance art has become a cornerstone of London’s cultural memory.

CHEERIO’s upcoming publication Pissing Women underscores this legacy, commissioning essays from writers and artists including Hettie Judah, Patricia Nilsson, Juno Calypso, Holly Blakey, Sophie Fiennes, Eileen Myles, Chila Burman, Lily Cole, and St Vincent. Their contributions frame Rickett’s puddles not as stunts, but as ongoing provocations, still relevant in an age where female bodies are scrutinised, surveilled, and disciplined.

Rickett herself is candid: she describes the work less as “appropriating masculinity” and more as pastiche - a parody of masculine entitlement played out in the most unladylike of gestures. It wasn’t Riot Grrrl slogans or ladette swagger - it was quieter, sharper, dressed in pinstripes, and performed at the marble feet of the corporate gods.

And it worked. Thirty years on, the images still shock, perhaps more now than then. For in an era of hyper-mediated protest, where every act of resistance comes with hashtags and brand tie-ins, Pissing Women reminds us of the power of unmediated, unapologetic gesture. No filter, no staging, just piss on stone.

Some protests demand attention with banners. This one left stains. And if stains fade, the memory doesn’t. Pissing Women endures because it unsettles both then and now, soaking into the cracks of London’s power structures - a stream that refuses to dry up.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Sophy Rickett.