The agency here resides in the mouths, hands, milky breasts of women, and is in each instance an ambivalent force. The mouths, open as though in speech, emit no utterances, and are arrested in the red lacquer that classically endows women as a signifier denoting them as ornaments. The hands, elegant and bejewelled, are so elongated as to be rendered ineffectual. When I was nursing my newborn daughter and had been repurposed as her nutritional apparatus, I sat in the bath with engorged breasts and noticed that as the milk dripped into the water, it formed perfect 'smoke rings', my body presenting a small moment of creative expression in the fug of new motherhood. Beneath these elements and upside down, an exchange is taking place between two women, one with a 'glass jaw', the other with a 'buttoned lip'. The more you see in this painting, the more sardonic the claim of agency seems.