Betty Tompkins’s Femme (2013), from her “Women Words” series, condenses many of the central concerns of her practice into a stark, compact image: the female body, the language imposed upon it, and the uneasy relationship between visibility and control. Across the upper portion of the canvas, the word “FEMME” appears in large block letters, rendered in a vivid orange-red that cuts sharply against the darker field below. Beneath it, the suggestion of a female torso emerges only partially, almost submerged within the surface. The result is both direct and elusive, combining the immediacy of text with the ambiguity of a body that is present but not fully revealed.

The “Women Words” series grew out of Tompkins’s attention to the actual language she encountered being used to describe women. Rather than inventing an abstract vocabulary, she drew upon words circulating in everyday speech and culture—terms that could be affectionate, sexualized, dismissive, degrading, admiring, or objectifying. By isolating these words and placing them directly onto or alongside images of the female body, Tompkins exposes the power language has to frame perception before a woman is even encountered as an individual. In this context, Femme is especially resonant. The word can suggest femininity, identity, style, sexuality, or categorization, but Tompkins refuses to stabilize it into a single meaning.

This tension between word and image is central to the painting. The text is crisp, emphatic, and declarative, while the body beneath it remains unstable and difficult to grasp. Tompkins has long examined the ways women are represented, sexualized, censored, and reduced by both imagery and language. In Femme, however, she approaches these questions through restraint rather than explicitness. Instead of presenting an overtly sexual image, she allows the figure to hover at the edge of visibility, forcing the viewer to negotiate between what is named and what can actually be seen.

Within the “Women Words” series, vocabulary itself becomes material. The words Tompkins had encountered being used to describe women are enlarged, isolated, painted, and subjected to scrutiny. Removed from casual conversation and placed into the formal space of a painting, even a familiar word can become strange, uncomfortable, or newly charged. The series therefore operates not only as an investigation of representation, but also as an examination of the accumulated social language surrounding women.

The color relationship intensifies this effect. The glowing orange-red of “FEMME” has the visual force of signage, branding, or even a warning, while the deep brown-black field below creates a sense of concealment. The textured surface prevents the work from reading as purely graphic; it remains tactile and painterly. Word and body compete for attention, and neither entirely controls the meaning of the other.

Created in 2013, Femme stands as a concise and powerful example of Tompkins’s “Women Words” series, in which language becomes a means of examining how female identity is constructed and perceived. Because the words originated in language Tompkins had actually encountered being used to describe women, the series carries a documentary quality as well as a conceptual one. Femme therefore operates not simply as a label, but as evidence of the cultural vocabulary through which women are seen, judged, desired, categorized, and understood