ROOMSHEET
Taking Up Space is planned to coincide with the March 2015 launch of ‘Future Feminist Archives by Contemporary Art and Feminism (CAF)’. The launch celebrates the 40th anniversary of International Women's Day, and is supported by several exhibitions at regional and university galleries and artist run spaces.
Taking Up Space opens on Friday 6 March 6-8pm and is open Friday - Sunday 11am - 5pm 7-22 March
As Articulate has a spatial focus and CAF’s focus is on an 'archive' of Australian women’s artwork, for Taking Up Space we made an open call-out asking for contemporary artists to respond spatially to an artwork from the Women’s Art Movement in Australia or from elsewhere in the oeuvre of women’s artwork in Australia (or from wherever the artist is living or comes from). The artwork from the women's archive will be on exhibition in the project space or on this blog.
Artists in Taking Up Space include Anka Leśniak, Anke Stäcker, Anne Graham, Barbara Halnan, Che Ritz, Elizabeth Ashburn, Georgina Brinkman, Helen M Sturgess, India Zegan, Janine Bailey, Janine Clark, Jennie Feyen, Jill Gibson, Katya Petetskaya, Lisa Tolcher, Loma Bridge, Rox de Luca, Sarah Fitzgerald, Susan Buret, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Veronica Habib, Victoria Lawson & Vivienne Dadour.
Their works respond to earlier works by artists Anne Ferran, Bea Maddock, Cygdem Aydemir, Elena Kovylina, Elzbieta Tejchman, Frances Hodgkins, Grace Cossington Smith, Hannah Höch, Marisa Merz, Michele Beevors, Nola Farman, Pat Hoffie, Pat Larter, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Rosalie Gascoigne, Rose Anne McGreevy, Rose Nolan, Stephanie Radok, Tracey Moffat, Vivienne Binns and the anonymous designer of the women's liberation badge.
Elzbieta Tejchman Imprints 1971
There are many differences between my "Body Printing"
and the "Imprints" of Elzbieta Tejchman, but what is
common is a memory of the body. Her series "Imprints"
had been made in the early seventies and was shown
only one time in 1971. The series was reminded in 2010,
after 40 years. I also wish to reference Elzbieta Tejchman,
because she is not as well known as some other women
artists in Poland.And Elzbieta Tejchman died last year.
Anka Leśniak's art project also includes deconstruction
of the way that art historians work, as well as research
into the role of women in art and art history.
For an example of this project see her 2010
Anke Stäcker Cut with the kitchen knife 2015
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| Anke Stäcker Cut with the kitchen knife 2015 (detail) |
Cut with the kitchen Knife 2015 reference:
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Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly
of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage of pasted papers,
90 x 144 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
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Anne Graham - She left The Table 2015
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She Left the Table (above as a work in progress) responds to
Vivienne Binns Mothers Memories Others Memories 1979-1981.
Viv’s work Mothers Memories 1979-1981 resonated strongly
with me when I first saw it. In Taking up Space I want to acknowledge
a heritage to Viv but also acknowledge women in gaol or
sweat shops where there are so many women, mothers, sisters,
daughters, women who suffer for protecting their own.
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Barbara Halnan The Power of Red 2015
Barbara plans to make a wall drawing in red,
using the forms created by the chairs in the foreground
of Grace Cossington Smith's painting The Lacquer Room.
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Grace Cossington Smith The Lacquer Room 1936 Collection AGNSW
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Che Ritz Cement Boxes 2010
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Che Ritz: Cement Boxes 2010 (Photo: Emily K Parsons-Lord)
The Women’s Liberation symbol united women and was an integral
part of the political discourse in the 1970’s & 1980’s. In December 1973
a group of women’s liberationists demonstrated outside Parramatta Girls Home
exposing child abuse, demanding welfare reforms and the closure of Parramatta
Girls Home and Hay Girls Institute. These demonstrations contributed
to public awareness, which eventually led to the closure of Parramatta Girls Home
and Hay Girls Institute in 1974.
Cement Boxes is a visual response to the incarceration
of young girls at Hay Girls Institute, Hay NSW. A disturbing narrative is
created by the manipulation of the safety pins by burning,
disfiguring and reshaping them and then setting them in cement.
This represents the inflicted lives of the girls who were “cut to size”.
The cement indicates the senseless hard labour imposed upon the girls.
For example, laying concrete paths then being forced to break
them up and relay them again. The rationale behind this treatment was to
break their spirits in order for them to “fit” into society and once released,
live a “normal” way of life.
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The Image Che is responding to.
Women’s Liberation Badge 1970’s
Elizabeth Ashburn Stop the Torture of Women 2015
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Elizabeth Ashburn Stop the Torture of Women 2015
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This work references art works Tiger Tiger and Love by
Rosalie Gascoigne. It references her use of grids,
word games,crosswords and text to state that
torture against women must be stopped.
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Rosalie Gascoigne Tiger Tiger 1987
Photo: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
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Georgina Brinkman Uncanny Valley 2015
a new multi-screen installation exploring notions
of both feminism and objectification within online spaces.
It is a response to an exhibition held 20 years ago called
Wollongong's World's Women Online,and curated in part
by Melinda Rackham. The exhibition was Australia's
first online women's group exhibition.
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Still from Uncanny Valley 2015. Image: Georgina Brinkman
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Source: www.subtle.net (Melinda Rackham's website).
Image: The Illawarra Mercury." |
Helen M Sturgess first and last 2015
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| Helen M Sturgess first and last 2015 |
a visceral response to the lifeboat in Bea Maddock's image:
October 19, 2001 ... 70 km south of western Java
As with 'All my children' (2014), this work refers to tragic fragments
of a family's story, gleaned from the many, often incomplete stories
of those who have perished during hazardous journeys seeking a safe
haven in Australia, a home in which their children can be tucked up
safely at night. I again attempt to 're-personalise' those who so
easily become nameless numbers, by eliciting a ‘that could be me/my
partner and my child’ response.
Bea Maddock No-where 1974
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India Zegan Interrupting the Spatial Plane 2015
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is referencing:
Janine Bailey Pantyhose Allowance $1714 2015
Rank for rank women fire fighters get paid more than men in Fire Rescue
NSW, this is due to the pantyhose allowance of $2.42 per fortnight. When
women were allowed to join the Fire Brigade in 1985 management modelled
the dress uniform on the NSW female police officers uniform which can be seen in
Tracey Moffatt's work with the female officer wearing pantyhose and sensible shoes.
The legacy of this lives on in contemporary female fire fighters pay. The sculpture in
my photograph represents the apparent fragility of a female fire fighter crawling inside
a structure fire. She is dressed only in pantyhose with the feet burnt off. $1714 AUD
is placed on the floor, the exact amount accumulated after my 21.5 years of panty
hose allowance. The sculpture is carrying a leather handbag that was issued
to me in 1992, but I was not issued any firefighting boots.
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Janine Bailey Pantyhose Allowance $1714 2015
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Janine Clark Traffic Sign Intervention 2014-5
Janine Clark Traffic Sign Intervention (detail) 2014-5
(performance and video documentation)
Traffic Sign Intervention is made in response to Rosalie Gascoigne,
the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice
Biennale, in 1982.Traffic signs reflect the power of language,
which is structured around gender, commanding obedience.
In an attempt to usurp their power Gascoigne cuts the signs up,
while I handwrite polite words onto the signs in an attempt
to highlight the alternative feminine voice.
Rosalie Gascoigne Tiger Tiger 1987
Photo: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Jennie Feyen My Core 2013
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Jennie Feyen My Core 2013 single channel video installation
My Core is explores female sexuality drawing from the traditions
of Butoh Theatre. Often addressing taboo topics, Butoh features
primal movements and absurd environments. Similarly, I want
to focus on the representation of female sexuality through the subject’s
self-gratification of her own body. The moving image depicts
a portrait of a young woman projected on to a bed of cotton balls
to create the visual illusion of a real woman enjoy her own body.
My Core reflects on the personal inhabitation of female sexuality
and rejects the need for external validation by positioning
the audience as a voyeur into the subject’s personal
exploration of sexuality. www.jenniefeyen.com
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Jennie Feyen is referencing:
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Vivienne Binns Japanese fabric III: In memory of the unknown artist Artist 2001
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Jill Gibson Spontaneous Looping Of An Agitated String 2015
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‘Spontaneous Looping Of An Agitated String’ references Marisa Mertz’s ‘Untitled (Living Sculpture)’ 1966.
It is intended as a sculptural, free flowing line, in direct response to the work of Mertz,
who uses readily available, materials and combines these with ‘traditional female crafts’.
Using the knitting, often viewed as a benign female hobby, the ‘yarn’, will droop, bend and be manipulated
in a similar way to that of the aluminium folded sheets of Mertz’s ‘Untitled Living Sculpture’.
The continuous ‘line’ will twist and flow across the space, yet due to its scale, will be obtrusive.
Its stretch fabric sheaf resembles a metallic surface, on the one hand demonstrating industrial qualities,
like a mass produced knitted mesh used for fencing, forming a barrier or obstruction between
one space and another, yet it remains rooted it in the domestic. ‘Spontaneous Looping Of
An Agitated String’ will be created in the space - image of work in progress below
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Katya Petetskaya All is Fine 2015
This work is a decaying portraiture performance/ installation.
I'm working with the theme of what I call "consumerism of
positivity", in the context of time, motion and liveness.
The work explores my own tendency (which I associate
with my upbringing in the society as a female) to
struggle for consistency and associated with it comfort.
Trying to hold onto positive side of things and inability
to respond adequately to the changing environment
inevitably puts one in a vulnerable state. I’m inspired
by Elena Kovylina’s Human Unconscious 2007 performance,
where she lay inside a glass cube in a museum dressed in
a costume by Prada for 24 hours, as a contemporary woman
“sleeping permanently inside a glossy sarcophagus of culture”.
I also draw upon Anne Ferran’s use of women’s garments as
‘helpers’ in womanhood but ultimately bandages, concealers
and restraints to compensate inadequacies of being a woman
(as in Spill 2002 and Shadow Land 2014).
Lisa Tolcher Journey into the Dark Inner Sanctum 2015
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Lisa Tolcher Journey into the Inner Sanctum 2015 (detail)
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I will respond to Michele Beevors skeletal works
in the exhibit ‘The Wreck of Hope’, on display at
the Forrester Gallery, Oamaro, New Zealand.
Beevors employed an experimental exploration
of a provincial-associated medium to create skeletal
bone structures of animals. Through this appropriation
of process and internal exploration I will work to produce
a dialogue concerning the taboo subject matter of female organs.
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Michele Beevors The Wreck of Hope 2014
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LIFTED in progress
Frances Hodgkins grew up in NZ. After some years painting, teaching & exhibiting there she
moved to England, then France(Paris) and Holland. In 1912 she sailed to Melbourne, showing at the
Theosophical society in Collins St, among other galleries, then to Sydney and Adelaide,
for two more exhibitions. She returned to NZ to see family and exhibit there,
but again moved to England in 1913, via Italy, and settled in Cornwall for the duration of the war.
She was restless, and subsequently moved around England and Europe for many years,
searching for accommodation, income and new subjects to which she could apply
her increasingly modernist skills, while maintaining an interest in theosophy. She died in Dorset in 1947.
I first saw her work back in 1966, in the Dunedin art gallery. And was astonished when the large painting
seemed to detach itself from the wall and come towards me - in 3D. When I attended her
lietmotif retrospective show at Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, in 2006, I saw that I had not been hallucinating.
Her landscapes float towards you… portraits 'sing off the wall', as Colin MacCahon noted.
She was an expat and so am I. The fraught question of expat artists and archival preservation in
National collections is something to be thought through, I feel: so many artists and writers left
the shores of both OZ and NZ in the early 20th century, escaping the narrow parameters
of art-making here, for modernism, Europe, bohemia... In choosing this artist subject it later
dawned on me that at the back of my mind were the recent objections to the
on the internet I saw that I had already unconsciously responded to it in
my first drawing for 'lifted.' I think NZ does quite well as far as preserving women’s work goes:
Frances Hodgkins is safely placed in that country’s art history,
but, as Maura Reilly outlined in her CAF talk last October – overseas, and here – we don’t do so well.
CAF’s timely Future Feminist Archive and TAKING UP SPACE point to the urgency of doing better
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Frances Hodgkins, in Melbourne 1912
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Frances Hodgkins, The Red Elevator, 1942.
goache 43.5 X 56.3cms, collection Dunedin Public Art GAllery
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Nola Farman The Lift Project 1979-82
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Nola Farman near Kandos February 2015 (photo: Liz Day)
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Phaptawan Suwannakudt Broken the Spell 2014
Tattooing and the performance of magic spells are restricted to men only in the Lanna (culture of
the North of Thailand) community. Phaptawan created a piece made by performing a rhythmic
piercing routine onto piece of paper on which Lanna poems were written from leftover of
tea and coffee (current agricultural product in grown in the North of Thailand) The pin pierced
through to the pile of cotton underneath which cushioned the paper. To do this she imitates
the action within thespace where women are allowed, that is sewing and dressmaking.
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Phaptawan Suwannakudt Broken the Spell 2014 handmade paper, thread and dyed yarn
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Sarah FitzGerald Confinement 2015
Being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ describes physically being in space.
It is a description of the way we relate to the built environment,
very simply you are either inside or outside a building. Being
inside can have both negative and positive connotations, such
as being trapped or being safe. Confinement is a neutral word,
as it describes a state of being contained by something but it has
a double meaning in that it also specifically describes, in obstetric
terms, the period of being in labour to the birth of a child. I like the
open ended possibilities that this ambiguous word provides; terror
for some and for others security or even joy and empowerment.
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Sarah Fitzgerald Boxed In tempura on board 2014
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Confinement 2015 is referencing:
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Rose Nolan, Why do we do what we do, Artspace, Sydney, 2008.
Courtsey of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Australia
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Seeing and being seen 2015
Rox De Luca and Stephanie Radok met at art school in Canberra in the early eighties
and have remained friends. Collaboration and friendship are leitmotifs of feminism,
and of the women’s movement. De Luca and Radok who live in different cities,
Sydney and Adelaide, plan a collaboration that crosses time and place.
Our proposal for Taking Up Space is called Seeing and being seen.
We plan to show a silkscreen poster made by Radok in 1982 for a women’s
Reclaim the Night benefit dance in Canberra alongside a new work made by
De Luca responding to Radok’s work. Hung side by side the works ask:
how much has changed for women in 33 years? Reclaim the Night is a global
women’s protest against men’s sexual violence held on the last Friday in October
each year.
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Stephanie Radok 1982 Reclaim the Night
poster, silk screen print
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Rox De Luca 2015 Reclaim the Night
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Susan Buret, Foot fall, 2014,
wool and acrylic on cotton, 45 x 60 cm approx, detail.
Exuberantly organic with its glittering iridescent surface,
Bumpty Bump is typical of Larter’s work which was described
by curator Gemma Watson in the catalogue to accompany the exhibition
body and gender politics”. Larter had described her work
as deliberately crafted to cause the viewer ‘ mental heartburn’
and I would argue that it was also designed to
engender some visual and spacial heartburn too.
I propose to make a hooked rug responding to the work by referencing
the colors and forms in the work. Working with a medium relegated to woman’s craft
I have chosen the format of a rug as a device to claim and identify
a space for gathering and to suggest warmth and nurturing
and with its unruly pile also to suggest a vigorous growth of hair.
The proposed rug will be approximately 90 x 60 cm.
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Veronica Habib Does my art look big in this? 2015
Veronica Habib is a performance and installation artist who
fashions her work around themes concerning body image,
shame and sexuality. Playing with the reveal and conceal
nature of clothing, she creates performative and interactive
garments designed to challenge her audiences social and
cultural perceptions associated with dress codes.
“Does my art look big in this?” uses humour and absurdism
to challenge the perceived cultural restrictions and implications
of conservative attire. The work is a commentary on the
non-discriminatory nature of the widespread cultural and
social objectification of women. It is referencing:
Cigdem Aydemir Site Occupied Installation view
Alpha Gallery, Newtown 2011
Victoria Lawson 40865 (2015)
tattoo, performance, documentation, webpage.
http://www.victorialawson.org/40865.html
Victoria Lawson has been researching in the area of
art tourism since 2004. At the completion of her PhD
thesis in 2014 she felt that it was important to situate
this research in the body and in space. 40865 focuses
on the labour of the PhD project; the concepts it drew
upon and exhibition practice.
40865 references:
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Pat Hoffie, Blackbirding (2006)
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Connections - a community project 2015
Connections is inspired by the concept and processes
underling Vivienne Binns' Mothers' Memories Others' Memories (1979-80)
Participants - Nicole Barakat, Freda Backes, Cecile Yazbeck, Dr Anne Monsour,
Antonia Simpson, Vivienne Dadour, The Lebanese Historical Society.
Women, whose life experiences connect to the lives of Lebanese migrant women
in Australia 1900-1950 were invited to contribute their memorabilia to form an
installation commemorating the significant roles of Lebanese women in Australian society.
Women’s work and influence is often invisible
and this is more so for the early Lebanese migrant women who as undesirable
immigrants were a hidden presence in Australian society.
Yet the strength of their contribution is evident in their enduring
influence in the lives of their descendants.
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The Lebanon Ladies War Comfort League of Australia- raised money for
Ambulances 1946 courtesy Australian Lebanese Historical Society.
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from the Australian Lebanese Historical Society
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Mothers' memories, others' memories: postcard rack.
1980 photo-screenprint, printed in colour vitreous enamels,
from multiple stencils; prints attached by nylon line to
anodised steel metal postcard rack
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