Rain Time, Second Printing

Publisher: Augenblick Press

Year: 2023

Format: Hardcover

Edition: New

Rain Time’ is an exhibition based on a large collection of photographs found at a flea market in London documenting the self-portraiture of one woman’s penchant for deep-sea submersion via the burgeoning world of rubber fetishism. The work embodies the spirit of the home hobbyist, willing to give her life to science in the ‘experimental diving tank’ otherwise understood as the stand-alone bath tub.

Made between the late 1950s and early 1960s, the collection pre-dates the controversial (for post war conservative Britain) Atom-Age publications as well as Helen Henley's Enter with Trumpets, which scandalised a British Public unwilling to let go of its tired conservatism and dusty pearls.

The collage works in the collection precede by at least 15 years what would become the cut n’ paste aesthetic of punk, devising and framing new identities culled from images in the daily papers, on the spectrum from Sophia Loren to Mrs Mills.

'Rain Time’ reveals a hitherto unseen world of exploratory erotic investigation taking place for personal satisfaction behind the net curtains of suburban Britain. It is so called for the catalogue of rubber wear accompanying the archive, one subsequently employed by Vivienne Westwood for her revolutionary Kings Road ‘Sex’ shop a decade later.

Hardback Book containing over 300 photographs on 228 pages.