Confusion is good for you.

It was through confusion that my first choice was ‘Her Posture Casts Her as a Victim’ by Lauren Kelly, a weirdly elegant, organic, tactile, playful and unsettling piece somewhat reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, which had not been entered for the competition. Kelly creates minimalist-baroque sculptures of contradiction and suspense, tense pieces held together by the unlikely juxtaposition of materials, forms, meanings and counter-meanings, a cohesive language being at work in all her art, her ist statement articulating to perfection the threads in her work. In ‘Consumed Debauchery,’ a laconic piece of minimal simplicity where carnal entanglement is represented by a long piece of tubular fabric snaking around a wooden trestle in sheer cannibalism, the snaking baroque movement capturing an all devouring event, meaning oscillates between an all-consuming desire and an event that, with certain distance, can be seen as physically oppressive, suffocating, embodying the entrapments of flesh. All of Kelly’s pieces inhabit space speaking about a strong sense of craftwomanship. ‘Mating with Itself’ was also on the short list as evoking a fluid sexuality, whilst ‘The Organ of Sense & Its Object’ was also discussed at some point, though it hadn’t been entered for the competition. Ultimately, it is the sheer being there of her works and the overwhelming presence of flesh and its predicaments, that made Kelly an ideal candidate.

A subversive fairy tale, ‘Happily Ever After’ by Sadie Hennessey proposes the erotic as a fabulous realm. A rocking horse becomes a rocking unicorn, the spiralling horn projected from the forehead, an erect penis. If a unicorn is a symbol of purity and grace, the innocence of an erection insists on doubling the innocence of the piece. Manifesting its latent content, a unicorn and its phallic symbolism turned actual phallus, the spiralling-horn-turned-penis dispassionately points to the fact that eroticism is ultimately in the head. Here, the erotic need is for something other, a desire still to be written, a realm of playful possibility,   the mane made from real human hair singing a lullaby about sexual energy, the physical stillness of fantasy dreamily awaiting the trigger of movement.

Are we before a solitary game? Why isn’t the rocking unicorn white? If "Happily ever after" is a stock phrase in fairy tales signifying a happy ending, does the colour beige point to contented boredom, to the impossibility of conceiving ever-lasting happiness as a rewarding state? We remain in polymorphous, innocent limbo. The spiralling horn turned penis projects itself to a pure, enigmatic, otherworldly fantasy world, beyond sex, an innocently ludic realm about the purity of desire, opening a portal to the unknown: when going through it, we’re elsewhere, eros as possibility.

Going back to the question: How can you create a hierarchy out of the sheer diversity of the shortlisted proposals of the erotic presented here? The fact is that you can’t. And yet you have to. I’d love to see a show of all these pieces. Let’s do a group show should be the mantra, that’s what kept going through my head. It was my inner curator who thought this thought. As a judge, there was ultimately one artist whose entire oeuvre resonated with me: Lauren Kelly.

“You write about Kelly,” said Joanna Pocock, the other judge, a wildly imaginative writer and discerning critic to boot. As judges, Joanna Pocock and me were supposed to write about two of the short-listed artists (right at the very end, another judge stepped in, Jan Woolf, author of the socially engaged and highly entertaining management-speak-riddled Fugues on a Funny Bone, who shortlisted a piece by Fionn Wilson we hadn’t thought about). Diabolically busy, touring my book of stories Red Tales, I was thinking I wasn’t going to have the time to write at length about the artists when I received an invitation to the Madrid Book Fair. No, I wasn’t going to have time. Whilst in Madrid, I received an email from Joanna saying: “I’d like to write about Gloria Oyarzabal’s ‘Hand’ and Sarah Fordham’s ‘Sieves’.” “Me too,” I replied. “Damn it!,” I said to myself, realising Joanna was calling the shots about the artists she was going to write about. So, in the end, I wrote about the prescribed two artists, but couldn’t help writing about all the others too. Let’s do a group show should be the mantra, still kept going through my head.

Highly conscientious and concerned with erotic quandaries (Whilst some of the many pieces Kelly had not entered were erotic, was ‘Consumed Debauchery’ really so?), Joanna and I also discussed the possibility of a joint prize. We were both seduced by Gloria Oyarzabal’s conceptually rich Hand, which also existed as a video piece. The video piece would be in good company next to Lauren Kelly’s. Yes, the thought make me giggle privately as I visualised the pieces together. Curatorially speaking, putting two and two together, the sum of both pieces mischievously added up to a hilarious foursome. The forces of order intervened: ‘there were not to be joint prizes.’ Order was restored. Irresistibly, the prize kept returning to Kelly’s work, utterly helpless to fight the initial attraction.

POSTCRIPTUM: At the Women’s Erotic Art Award Ceremony, in conversation with the winner Lauren Kelly, I was surprised to find out her thesis touched on the issue of underrepresentation of women in the arts. Several years younger than me, I was puzzled to hear that the younger generation of women artists are still having to tackle the same issues that preoccupied me as a student. Ouch.

That very week, I also came across more startling statics: a Facebook post courtesy of Countesses about The Venice Biennale, which revealed that the exhibition showcased the work of 69% male artists and only 24% female artists, the remaining 7% being collaborations … A few weeks later, Twitter trolls bombarded Caroline Criado-Perez with rape threats and miscellaneous violence for her successful campaign to get Jane Austen on to the £10 note ... ...  ... Will the 21st century start, please?