To fully comprehend Lily Bunney’s pointillist pictures, it makes sense to adjust your proximity, step away from the drawings, or hold your phone away from your face. In contrast with Sophy Rickett’s acclaimed 90s series, Pissing Women – in which Rickett photographed women in business wear urinating around London’s financial district after dark – the protagonists in Bunney’s images, though similarly engaged, require some decoding.
“There is something about the fact I’m not doing this in a full-on, abrasive way, that I think gives me wiggle room – that slight abstraction is helpful,” says the artist, reflecting on her use of pointillism for her new solo show, girls peeing on cars, a collaboration between Guts Gallery and miłość. “I enjoy calling myself a pointillist, then being like, ‘I’m going to do a show of girls peeing on cars’. That’s quite funny, but I am very earnestly doing it, this is serious to me.” As per the show’s title, the show revolves around a series of large-scale drawings depicting women urinating between parked cars.
Where Rickett photographed her friends, Bunney, intimate with “the trenches of Google”, works with found images. The bulk of the pictures she used for this series were provided by a single now-deleted fetish account on X, found while researching an earlier, car-focused art project she collaborated on with a friend. “We had this big Google Doc with things we associated with cars, and one that came up was when you were out as a young adult, you’d left the party and had to pee – hiding behind your friends standing beside a car. There’s something very generous about supporting a friend to feel secure and safe, doing something that maybe feels like it should be shameful, but just having fun. I have strong memories of that.” While shame and guilt are familiar concepts for the artist, girls peeing on cars is staunchly celebratory, a foregrounding of this particular sense of camaraderie – a rite of passage, often – and the friends she holds dear.
When you were out as a young adult, you’d left the party and had to pee – hiding behind your friends standing beside a car. There’s something very generous about supporting a friend to feel secure and safe – Lily Bunney
These relationships are the nucleus of the show (described by Bunney as a “love letter to friendship”), and among the peeing scenes is a series made from her photographs of her actual friends, shot on her phone at a birthday dinner where everyone was asked to hold hands. “The more I worked on the show, the more it became about friendship and celebrating structures of support in your life that maybe are under-celebrated,” she explains, referring to the show’s throughline. “I work alone, but the really exciting part of my process is with friends, talking about the work I’m making. I’m aware most people don’t read imagery of girls peeing on cars as a moment of solidarity and friendship, but I really loved the imagery and thought it did a lot.”
Contemplating the show’s title, she explains that ‘women’ is simply less common in her own vocabulary. “And maybe ‘girls’ feels a bit less charged?” she offers. “I didn’t want the show to be about girlhood, but I was thinking about how girlhood is depicted and wanting to throw my own two cents in.” Certainly, there is a youthful sensibility present in the works, especially in the pictures of her friends, where watercolour pencils are swapped out for plastic gems. In part, the result of hours spent watching shopping TV (the remedy to nights of poor sleep) and an appreciation of American celebrity Trisha Paytas, Bunney approaches what she calls this ‘earnest tackiness’ like the rest of her work: sincerely and in acknowledgement of its cultural positioning. “Aesthetically, it’s very similar [to the drawings], it’s got the same kind of pointillist thing,” she shares of the gem pieces, “but it’s a fun way of moving away from the initial conceit of that [bejewelled] aesthetic.”
Once a maths teacher (she mostly uses the squared paper of exercise books for her drawings), Bunney’s firm interest in marrying art and technology is central to her visual language, informed early on by Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones. “When I graduated from art school, I moved from thing to thing quite rapidly, medium-wise. It almost became a way for me to not know myself,” she recalls. Crocheting had been one of these previous iterations, which would lend itself to the patterns of pointillism. “Because of the way I draw and filter [the work], sometimes the images are hard to read. That interfacing, I think, is perfect. It’s making people sit at that precipice I wanted them to.”
Visit the gallery above for a closer look.
Lily Bunney’s girls peeing on cars (a collaboration between Guts Gallery and miłość) is running at Guts Gallery, London, from October 25 – November 19, 2025.