own right- as any Caucasian man or woman. The title of the artworks is important- it reveals to us a more
political side of Sulter’s thought processes.
Traditionally, in the more classical depictions, the Muses are each pictured with an object symbolic to the
area of art, history or science they represent. Again, Sulter has honoured this, yet has given her own Muses
objects that are more representational of the particular women she had chosen to model the characters for
her.
Interestingly, Sulter’s portrayal of Calliope also doubles as a self-portrait of sorts- without, however,
actually portraying herself. This is a method also adopted by Cindy Sherman- who, of course, used herself
as a model to portray a variety of characters and scenarios in her photographic works. Both women work
by putting the women they use as models centre stage in the idiom of celebrity, both women have used
themselves in their work without actually revealing anything about themselves as an individual (Sherman
in the majority of her works, where she constructs scenarios and characters within a single frame to allow
the audience to unravel and piece together a story, and Sulter both in “Hysteria” where she created a ‘part
fictional’ character, the story of whom was woven through the exhibition to tell a story, and also in
“Zabat” where she presented herself as Calliope, one of the nine Muses).
The idea of presenting oneself in an image without actually revealing any part of the self is certainly an
intriguing one. The images that Sulter and Sherman produce are not “self-portraits” in the traditional
sense; where it would be expected that something about the artist would be exposed within the image
(either physically or metaphorically), but instead reveal more about the body of work and suggest that the
artist is using her body as a vessel to the message that the artwork is striving to portray.
Sulter's work in particular relies on audience interpretation along with the message she intends to
communicate, and interestingly, she does nothing to reveal herself amongst the other Muses- in line with
the way she has kept all the models anonymous, despite the fact that they were chosen on the basis of their
relevance to the success