Art, Age and Gender: women explore the issues

Opening Date: 2002-Apr-27
Closing Date: 2002-Jun-30
National touring Group exhibition
Selected exhibition by Germaine Greer Jenny Saville and Francis Borzello, Dr leoni Kellaher.
Orleans House gallery London; Usher Gallery Lincoln; New Greenham Gallery

Publication Art Age and Gender

The work selected for this exhibition consisted of a large format photograph of a Victorian birthing bench, pair of black leather covered milk bottles with pewter caps, and a work called 'Preserve' twenty-one jars of jam with pewter covers in various stages of fermentation. The fruit within was gathered in 1999 and is preserved as evidence and labour from a previous century rather than provision.

This work continues my research into the implications of cultural associations with objects from a gendered perspective. Exploring the poetics of objects through manipulation of ready-made materials to provide a new visual rhetoric. Investigating the roles of women through objects and activity from child -birth to jam making these works suggest an open-ended narrative, which again is slightly foreboding.

The bench is a witness not just to births but abortions miscarriages and other procedures but also a witness also to lost dignities, to control and domination. As an object it has the power to transform a women at her most powerful into her most powerless. It is simultaneously cruel and kind, an instrument designed to tie a woman down in the most vulnerable way. I came across this bench by chance and was surprised by my own reaction to an object.

Anna Briiten reviewed this "as work that without resorting to cliche' addresses the issue of gender in the 21st century".
Ana Finel Honigman described it as "international, compelling showcasing materials and methods inspired by feminist theory and women's common experiences, at a time when feminist concerns are considered uncool in contemporary art".