Marie-Claire Springham

"Go on, Rub me"

Why did Arthur Guilleminot make a giant butt plug from urine-based soap?

Recently featured at the Neo Futurist Dinner, this artist specialises in “queered approaches” to everyday household objects and daily rituals. His work is often overtly sexual, using objects associated with the fetish and BDSM community “as a way of exploring and bending sexual and gender conventions”.

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Portrait of Arthur Guilleminot holding Piss Soap - by Marie-Jo Guilleminot

After studying Design and Marketing, he began to play with gender, identity and pop culture, incorporating ravey tribal prints and vulgar symbolic objects into trippy rituals of his own making. He embraces “the awkward and uncanny”, using this piece, entitled “Go on, Rub me”, as a multitool for discussion.

The soap is made using uric acid derived from the artist’s urine and is a suitable cleansing medium. However, provocatively shaped, it also questions our aversion to our fetishes, asking whether the object is still perverse once the sight of it has been normalised. Through its use, Guilleminot invites you to cleanse yourself of “pre-made ideas about sexuality.”

He describes this piece as a “Consumerist dirty pleasure” and an attempt to “wiggle the system” by creating an experience for the viewer that is playful, performative and otherworldly. He releases us from our heteronormative daily lives in his work and welcomes us into his newly created “Heterotopia”.