Archive

Developing work from public statues, a series of ’Sir Thomas Brock at Home’ based on images drawn from the Victoria Memorial (whose sculptor was Sir Thomas Brock), exploring its representations of empire and gender.

An installation at London’s ICA, juxtaposing images from Sir Thomas Brock’s Victoria Memorial, juxtaposed with contemporaneous and modern racialised images of colonial production from tea and coffee packaging.

1984–85 (see also 1986)

Painting from scenes observed as artist in residence at Durham Cathedral spanning the academic year 1984-85. The prestigious residency was imbued with conflict, hosted with a studio in the Cathedral close and lodgings in Hatfield College, Durham University. In that period the Church of England had not yet agreed to ordain women, and the all male students of the College were campaigning against the as yet unrealised intention of their mostly male lecturers’ to allow for applications from school girls as well as boys. By autumn 84 the extremely bitter Miners’ Strike (6 March 1984 – 3 March 1985) was clearly losing ground, although activist miners and miners’ wives were still a presence in Durham City and other mining areas. Three weeks into the residency the incoming Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins’ enthronement sermon was widely celebrated for its direct challenge to the punitive actions of Prime Minister Thatcher and the CEO of British Coal, Ian MacGregor. Towards the end of the residency on 13 July 1985 the Miners’ Gala, an annual miners’ festival which takes over the City, continued the spectacular band-playing procession by miners’ into the Cathedral to open the annual service dedicated to the miners. Within a week, the Cathedral held its annual Matins for Her Majesty’s Courts of Justice whose judges and magistrates were frequently handing out punishment to activist miners.

1986 (see also 1984-85)

From the residency at Durham Cathedral, an installation Durham Effigy was shown as a solo exhibition alongside Peter Doig’s, together titled The Naked City, at Air Gallery, London. Durham Effigy consisted of a large ‘bed’ covered in watercolour paper with drawings in watercolour, pastels, pencils etc made from the residency. Murals on the walls of the gallery represented the blind arcading of the Cathedral, with apparent punctures in the walls to see realistic drawings taken from County Durham’s bleak mining villages which, in reality, are several miles beyond Durham City’s close high horizon. Four large watercolour paintings hung on the walls, visually linked to the image of the woman on the ‘bed.’ Informed by its contemporaneous politics, the installation referenced the artist’s embodied experience of isolation and conflicts of class and gender. It drew on images from the Cathedral, for instance, the Miners’ Memorial, and broken up effigies of local aristocrats which were commonly believed to represent Durham’s history as a northern outpost of oppressive Southern English government.

1986 – 87 Anecdotal Landscapes

Reflecting on ideas of creativity, sisterhood and gardens in the process of making numerous drawings in the Sussex gardens of sisters Virginia Woolf (Monks House) and Vanessa Bell (Charleston), local to the artist’s teenage home. Four paintings were made as a commission from Public Art Development Trust for Harold Wood Hospital, Essex.

Coming of age in the 1970s, for the first time women had reliable contraception and access to legal abortion. Ambitious women artists could postpone or avoid maternity which would be detrimental to their career. These works explored ambivalence, desire, and precarity.