The Real Trouser-Word Piece
Signwriter’s enamel and gesso on cardboard with twine, 2026
We have used the name Lesliey Smith, with various spellings, on a few occasions when we felt the performance of an alternative authoring to a work was needed. Originating as an imaginary member of office staff invented to deal with a visiting photocopier engineer, the name never possessed a “correct” or gendered spelling. Lesliey, Leslie, or Lesley Smith is an imaginary artist through whom we openly speak. To this extent, our use of the name is more akin to a ventriloquist and their figure, rather than a secretive nom de plume.
The Real Trouser-Word Piece consists of a wearable cardboard sandwich board, finished with a white gesso background and hand-painted text declaring ‘LESLIEY SMITH WEARS THE TROUSERS’ across both front and rear. Left resting in the middle of the gallery floor as if recently discarded by its wearer, the object suggests a body that has only just stepped out of view. In the gallery guide, the entry dutifully attributes the artwork to Lesliey Smith.
On first encounter, the name Lesliey and the idiom ‘wear the trousers’ offer an almost irresistible contemporary temptation toward a literal reading of gender politics. Yet to treat the artwork merely as a social commentary is to restrict the range of its linguistic play.
In its title, the work signals an unmistakable affiliation with Keith Arnatt’s 1972 Trouser-Word Piece, which paired a photograph of the artist wearing a sandwich board declaring ‘I’M A REAL ARTIST’ with an extract on trouser-words, such as ‘real’, by the Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin. Yet unlike Arnatt, Lesliey Smith is not a real artist at all, and following Austin’s logic, is the one who therefore wears the trousers.
