Lily Bunney: girls peeing on cars

Guts Gallery and miłość present the first solo exhibition by British artist Lily Bunney, ‘girls peeing on cars’. It is the first of two presentations of Lily Bunney’s work as a collaboration between the galleries, with the second part to open at miłość in November. 

‘Girls peeing on cars’ is an expression of reverence for friendship, with the exhibition being an homage not just to the concepts of closeness, communion, mutual support and celebration, but also to Lily’s actual friends. Lily speaks of narrating her life through friendship, with her adulthood being an exploration of comfort evolving from close personal relationships. 

She calls it an awakening, a feeling of security and carelessness, of being held, found in friendship. The events in the exhibition all happen during one night out – the key moments inflated in scale, while the smaller works provide context and set the environment with a germinating familiarity of queerness and girlhood.

In this body of work, Lily Bunney re-contextualises found digital imagery of girls peeing on cars and scenes of expressions of friendship and communion, and turns them into pointillist watercolour paintings. The series started with her creating large-scale paintings of girls peeing on cars, which accompanied her fiction writing on experiences of queer community building in the context of nightlife, and then extended towards smaller-scale works around friendship, feelings of belonging, and tactile intimacy. Lily completes the body of work with photographs of herself and her friends ‘developed’ as gem art, with tiny plastic diamonds forming scenes of celebration and everyday interactions between friends, in the style she describes as ‘earnest tackiness’. 

The exhibition is curated by Aleksandra Moraś, the director of miłość gallery and Lily Bunney’s friend.

On girls peeing on cars

Exhibition text by Aleksandra Moraś 

to accompany Lily Bunney’s ‘girls peeing on cars’

Lily and I met doing a temp job a year ago. We were sat in the ual offices for eight hours each day with very little to do, and so we talked. We gossiped about the art world, Lily saying she wanted to be a successful artist, me saying I’d like to open a gallery. We drank black coffee and talked about books, Lily told me about being a maths teacher and how reading Sadie Plant influenced her technique, and showed me around her home town on google maps, and explained what woolworths was. I met Lily’s friends, who also worked temp jobs at ual, we talked about their feelings and concerns, Lily met my friends, we talked about their feelings and concerns, we talked about dating, about how our relationship with ourselves is reflected through our relationships with others. Lily showed me her work and her new tattoo, and told me she was planning another tattoo – a lower back one which said ‘when I count my blessings, I count my friends’.

We talked about books a lot and read a lot during our uneventful workdays. We exchanged books, including Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’, which Lily bought during lunch in the boat bookshop on the canal, and Julia Fox’s memoir ‘Down the Drain’ which had just come out at that time. I got it from my partner’s parents for Christmas, but had already read it at that point. I gave it to Lily and she read it in a day. Our then manager, and now dear friend, Amrita has my copy of ‘Down the Drain’ now. Lily and I spoke about Julia Fox a lot, about reclaiming feelings of shame, re-contextualising them, owning up and taking control of stories that others might be sharing behind your back. We talked about how liberating it felt to read it and how close it felt to what Lily was thinking about when creating the ‘girls peeing on cars’ series. 

We hosted a birthday party and what was a soft launch of the gallery in my flat in Finsbury Park and put up one of the pieces from this show, ‘Girls Peeing on Cars #3 (More Peeing)’, alongside the Jennette McCurdy one with a cat crotch, and a series of five soft-core porn images turning into a yawning cat that Hayden had made the frames for by hand. Meow meow. We invited all of our friends, and all of our gay friends came, and they drank Polish wódka my sister brought from Warsaw that morning, and diet coke that Lily likes, and Lily was drawing on Freya’s body with a pink sharpie, and we took flash pictures that Lily then made into gem art pieces. We danced until very late, boobs were flashing, and Hannah made everyone perform her choreography to ‘I’m Still Standing’. The gays took over my disco playlist and put on Lady Gaga, Hannah asked me who Lady Gaga was. We sold the works to our friends, and sang ‘Groove Is in the Heart’, Martha wore this amazing corset and danced with Patryk a lot. And Lily and I had our thongs poking out of our trousers (I would say pants) as a coordinated effort of this shared belated Pisces birthday party during Aries season – the most emotionally immature star sign.

That first show in our flat we called ‘guilt-free’ and talked a lot about shame and guilt, and how it’s inherent to growing up as a girl, and inherent to growing up queer and so many other things. Lily gave me this book to read called ‘I’m a Fan’ by Sheena Patel and I hated it and didn’t want to finish it, and so I complained to Lily, but she said she liked it because she likes unhinged women, and the character is obviously very wrong and deeply flawed, but for people who don’t acknowledge such shame and selfishness it can remove some shame.

Lily talks about her friends so much and always with such admiration. I was her relatively new friend, and she has this university friends group, and they are all beautiful and amazing, and hearing about them was such a pleasure. She told me they went to this restaurant for Martha’s birthday dinner (I’m not very close with Martha but always admire how kind and beautiful she is – and a great dancer), and they all held hands and said what they were grateful for. And Lily said she was grateful for not feeling that lonely anymore. 

During that other party, Lily read us a short story that she wrote, in which someone tells their friend of a night out in a club in London. London can be a very lonely city and it’s nice to find ways of making it less lonely, Lily said to me once. In the story, this person went to the club alone and had to pee, and so they joined this group of girls in the queue, and they said they knew a spot, and they went to this carpark to pee. And they became a part of this random group of friends, and it’s such a relatable interaction and a beautiful act of safekeeping fellow girlies and queers, for whom nightlife (cismen) poses dangers we would like to protect everyone from. An act of finding joy in uniting against oppression. We read Samuel Delany’s ‘Times Square Red, Times Square Blue’ and wondered what lesbian cruising could look like. 

When I think of being carefree and tactile, like a lot of Lily’s works, I think about girlhood and sisterhood but with a sense of grief and longing. But Lily told me for her it was an awakening – rather than regaining something that’s lost, she thinks of it as something germinating further. She lives with her friends, and her life – reflected in the friendships – is what you imagine being a grown up is as a kid. Feeling held by people, by a chosen rather than nuclear family.

It made all the sense that Lily’s first show would be about her friends. An image of friendship that’s very physical and tactile, very literal and honest. A documentation of existing friendships providing context and setting the scene for images of a friendship imagined. As Lily moves to her second presentation, it feels like a full circle for me – and for miłość gallery that images of girls peeing in many ways brought to life. She told me reality is in flux but fantasy is forever.

Aleksandra Moraś, Oct 2024