Originally published in The Guardian as 'Beards, breasts and bloody bodies'.

Within the next month, two of the most important exhibitions of work by young fine artists will open in London - and of the 31 people whose work will be shown only six are men.

The fact that this imbalance between the sexes has happened at both shows makes it seem more than a quirk. It certainly wasn't intentional: work is submitted to the BT New Contemporaries anonymously, yet 18 of the 22 chosen turned out to be female. At the Barclays Young Artist Award 1993 eight of the 10 artists chosen from recent post-graduate shows are women. For this up-and-coming generation, the claim sometimes voiced that female artists find it harder to gain acceptance than men rings pleasingly hollow.

But these women have not done a 'Thatcher' and beaten men at their own game by being more 'male' than men. In fact, for Tacita Dean, the one artist featured in both shows, the female body is a major theme. What makes her work so enjoyable is her mischievous use of irony - at her post-graduate show at the Slade School of Art last year the audience at the short film she showed errupted with a spontaneous laughter rarely found at these events. While Dean's subject matter is often serious, her treatment of it is never pompous.

For BT New Contemporaries she is showing an image which at first glance appears to be a copy of Manet's Dejeuner sur L'herbe, the picture of a nude woman picnicking with two clothed men which so shocked audiences in the 1860s. At second glance it is clear that the image is a photograph and that whereas in Manet's painting it is the two men who have beards, in Dean's image it is the nude woman who sits proudly stroking her fine, if artificial, crop of facial hair.

'Usually, the last thing people will think of is that it's a woman in a false beard, they'll try every alternative,' says Dean. 'They'll say, "It's a man, it's a bloke with tits isn't it?", or "Did you superimpose the head on?". They ignore the fact that it's such a simple thing.' The enduring strength of the taboo surprises her.

Dean, who is 27 and lives in London, had a conservative, if quirky, upbringing. Her father is a retired circuit judge ('Artificial hair's played an important part in my life,' she grins) and he named his three children after classical heroes. Add her Catholic background to the classical name and it's hardly surprising that she is fascinated by mythology.

Her work for the Barclay's Young Artist Award is a series of images which, again, reproduce a famous painting using friends as models and a seemingly ad hoc collection of props. And again, the resulting photographs look disconcertingly like the original, Tiepolo's The Martyrdom of St Agatha, painted in the 1750s.

Tiepolo's painting shows St Agatha shortly after her breasts were cut off because she refused to give herself to a Roman soldier. Remaining a Christian virgin was so important to her that this gross physical mutilation seemed preferable. Dean says that a surprising number of women saints had similarly awful experiences. 'It seems women have to go through the most appalling cruelty in order to get to the state where the male church decides that you can be canonised.'

The work, devised last year while the Church of England was debating the ordination of women has an obvious contemporary relevance. 'The only way Agatha could achieve something in the Church was the removal of her breasts,' says Dean. 'For a lot of female saints their suffering is all to do with their sexuality, whereas with men it's much more spiritual.'

In Dean's set of three images, the plate bearing the removed breasts has been substituted: in one by a plate containing two jellies; in the next by two flaming Christmas puddings; and in the last by two steamed puddings. 'I remember going round a cake shop and being surprised by how bosomy the cakes looked, all round with cherries on top,' says Dean. 'And I wondered how much your desire for eating cake...'

While this substitution makes the anguished look on Agatha's face in both Tiepolo's original and Dean's versions seem ludicrious, it also raises questions. Looking at Dean's versions of St Agatha's plight we can all laugh, uneasily, and believe that we now have a much more civilised society, with a more flexible definition of the feminine ideal.

Yet how many millions of women spend how many hours of their lives trying to remove facial hair?

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Julia Thrift interviews artist Tacita Dean