Commercial Drive, Vancouver, early 1980s. There was a poster in Angles, a free lesbian and gay weekly, a centrefold for international lesbian week. The poster was a collage of photographs of sexual images of lesbians: i.e., women kissing, a woman's hand on a woman's pussy, a woman's mouth on a woman's breast, naked women and women alone in sexual poses. The centrefold collage outraged the lesbian community. In particular, one picture caused the deepest censure: that of a woman sitting, torso and nipple ring visible, the rest of the body fragmented. The community was caught up in a maelstrom of ire and disapproval. The letters column of Angles carried irate correspondence for months to come. There was talk of a boycott of the paper. The issues quickly became polarized into a binary division between S/M sex and vanilla sex, with the bad/good associations alongside the existing camps.

S/M sex is bad because it perpetuates the oppressive power dynamics that exist in heterosexual relationships; S/M is good because it challenges the narrow definition of relative power dynamics that exist in human relationships.

Artist Persimmon Blackbridge's own response to the argument was amazement at the varying interpretations people put on a single image and at the fact that the lesbian community would so forcefully censure itself against viewing lesbian sex and women's bodies from an eroticism not identified as their own. Blackbridge wanted to move away from reducing the debate into a vanilla sex vs. S/M sex duality and into a more useful (sometimes painful) debate that explored the power, politics and pleasures of lesbian sexuality. Blackbridge's own need to continue the dialogue that the centrefold began in the community was the impetus for her involvement in the first project of the Kiss & Tell collective (members three: Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart), the exhibition Drawing the Line.

Photographer Susan Stewart took a series of photographs of Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones doing sexual things together, alone and in the presence of others. The photos were carefully staged to present a myriad of sexual images seen to be problematic in the lesbian community, from S/M role playing to male voyeurism. One hundred photos were hung on a gallery wall, lined up in terms of controversial content, from what the collective considered to be the least controversial to the most controversial. Women viewers were provided with heavy markers and invited to write comments about the images on the wall. The markers were the thick black kind that would even write on the glass over the images. Male viewers were invited to write comments in a book.

The end result was a silent, endless conversation room in which taboos and the outrageous could be discussed with anonymity and passion. Visually, the writing dominated the walls; the photos were tight geometric edges in a sea of handwritten messages. There were jokes, lengthy analyses, philosophical tracts, comments that generated more comments and editorials--the sum was a living dialogue.

Drawing the Line succeeded in continuing and challenging the discourse that arose out of the initial centrefold in Angles. The piece travelled for four years, visiting centres throughout Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. In San Francisco, the gallery had to install a ladder so participating viewers could reach the uppermost wall space when the handwriting became too densely crowded below.

Persimmon Blackbridge is a learning-disabled-lesbian-cleaning-lady-sculptor-performer-video-artist and a member of the anti-psychiatry movement. Persimmon Blackbridge does art. Maybe through sheer necessity, because without it life would be a miserable kind of non-existence. She's not an artiste by tradition or appointment, she does it for self-preservation. Art is the tongue of her language. For her, art is a tool of communication; communication with all of its intricate contradictions, open-ended questions, de facto statements and incessant discourse. Much of her work is pieced together within collectives or collaborative projects with other artists. This kind of communion works to enhance the accessibility of her art. Her large sculptures rarely stand without accompanying text in a gallery space. It is as if she can't leave the piece with too many interpretive options available to the viewer. Art isn't meant to be a mystery, deciphered by those "in the know" with proper art training and sensibilities. Breaking barriers of accessibility in art through her own work is part of the impetus that drives Blackbridge.

* If the world doesn't make sense, then you try to make sense of it through the different faculties you have at your disposal: mind, sight, sound, touch and smell.
* When you think you've got a handle on some of the questions and maybe some of the answers, what better way to communicate them than through art?

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