In 1971 she baptized herself "Saint Orlan," festooning her body with billowing draperies made of black vinyl or white leatherette. She exhibited these elaborate sculptural costumes in a show in Milan in 1972. Soon she began to wear her ever more exaggerated faux- Baroque costumes in staged tableaux vivants. High contrast color photographs of Saint Orlan, both living doll and living sculpture, were integrated into photo- collages, videos and films tracing a fictive hagiography.
"Convinced that with its exaggerated emotionalism Bernini's St. Teresa in Ecstasy was the first postmodernist sculpture, Orlan found relationships between the forced pathos of Counter- Reformation esthetics and the historical references of contemporary artistic practice. The prototype image of Saint Orlan was a marble sculpture she carved and then, in the tradition of academic sculpture since the Renaissance, sent to be enlarged or 'pointed up' to full scale. Her incarnation as Saint Orlan focused on the hypocrisy of the way society has traditionally split the female image into madonna and whore. She played off this long- entrenched dichotomy by exposing only one breast (as the nursing Virgin Mary is depicted), to differentiate Saint Orlan from a topless pinup. (The single exposed breast also referred to the Amazons of ancient mythology, represented as having only one breast to be free to sling warriors' quivers over exposed chests.)" (Barbara Rose, Art in America)