Since finishing university I wanted to be a curator, not really knowing what it meant. I thought it was just putting pretty pictures on walls. Yes, that is apart of it but the preparation and the arrangements to get an exhibtion up and running is much harder. I graduated in 2011 and since then I have been building up my confidence in doing what I love. I have help other people with exhibitions, but never done it by myself. I knew from the start I wanted to do exhibitions focusing on women and women issues. This year I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and thinking a job is going to fall into my lap and just do what I wanted to do. I started finding feminism to find feminist in the north east and show how wonderful the north east art scene really is. I was lucky enough to get a space off a wonderful women I have known for a couple of years whilst volunteering in a space near her gallery space. I was over the moon when she said I could have the space. Over the passed few month I found artists and friends to help me out, as this was my first adventure I didn't know a lot of artists. I created this exhibtion with no money and I feel it came out great. Here is a little run down of the theme of the show and the artists involved. I did some pieces for the walls, to show how the movement of feminism has moved through time.
Theme
This exhibition explores the power of language and feminism. Language has had an amazing effect on feminism, from The Suffragette storming the streets with their protest signs to standing on their soapbox to address the crowds. Feminism in the 1970s, where art and writing moved the way for women's rights. Feminist writer have created iconic work challenging the roles of women in society, from Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to modern writers, Naomi Wolf and Caitlin Moran. Now, Social Media is having a huge impact on the next wave of feminism, everyday women are expressing the wrongs in the world by simply sending a tweet. Group such as Everyday Sexism and No More Page Three have done some amazing protesting online. With any movement, there is always a backlash and feminism is arguable (to some people) one of the most hated words. Over the years the word has become an insult, a dirty word. Searching through social media you can explore the variety of hashtags and groups that are just there to focus on hatred towards feminists. Feminism is Cancer is a popular hashtag on twitter and there are many anti feminism groups. This exhibition explore the power of the dirty word! Creating the work is three local artists who have explored language and feminism in their work.
The Artists
Carol Sommer
Sommer uses film found objects, installation and text in attempts to engage with the discourses of literature and library criticism.
“I am intrigued by the roles that the female characters play in the 26 novels written by Dame Iris and published between 1954 and 95 and to see what results re framing her fictional depictions of their experiences can yield.”
Cosmic Order I
Cosmic Order I responds to the depiction of female experience in the novels of Iris Murdoch. Whilst there are many ways of thinking about what might constitute female experience, in this instance, and reacting initially to the author’s warnings about the dangers of classification, the strategy used to make the work was to apply Iris Murdoch’s philosophical thinking to her particular fictional depictions of female experience. The author’s incorporation of Plato’s myth of the cave, his picturing of human life as a “pilgrimage from appearance to reality” into her writing (both fictional and philosophical), prompted the collation of text relating to women and fire sourced from the 26 novels which is set to the rhythm of an extended edit of Jimi Hendrix's 1968 Burning of the Midnight Lamp. Plato, Iris Murdoch suggests, “often uses musical metaphors, and treats audible harmony as an edifying aspect of cosmic order”. The chair responds both to the seated position of the prisoners in the cave, and to the drawing room settings in which much of the action in the novels takes place. The computer monitor and headphones provide an interface through which viewers are invited to consider the relationship between Murdochian fictional females and fire, - a source of energy and power yet also the element so central to the myth of the cave and the shadowy world of illusion…
Nicola Stokoe
Poet Nicola Stokoe explores through her poetry, what the issues are like for women today and the pressures society puts on women.
Modern Identity
They live in your adverts
Your media and phone,
Convince you to buy all
The things that you own.
To keep mouths shut and minds full of cotton,
Keeping real troubles buried, forgotten.
Your brain remains focused on meaningless shit,
on Apple’s designs and Kardashian tits.
Rebecca Simpson
Sunderland based artist and curator. Her work focuses on the obsession with self image and make up. Creating a youtube makeup tutorial, putting on her makeup and expressing the words of Naomi Wolf in her book, The Beauty Myth.
RESURFACING pt.2
Through the embodiment of her online persona of the YouTube Beauty Guru, an alternative perspective of the ‘beauty industry’ is both explored and questioned. Not only the photographer, Rebecca utilizes herself as a case study representative of the wider beauty cult following furthermore as part of the audience. Discussing on the surface shared interests within the online beauty community in comparison to her own conflicting thoughts and those of feminists such as Naomi Wolf and Caitlin Moran.
The use of social media including Instagram and Facebook alongside her personal beauty blog coincides with her online YouTube video series. Accessible to a worldwide on-screen audience, the use of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tool enabled the placement of her videos within the online beauty and skincare circle despite their interlinking yet contradictory content. The gallery subtracts her YouTube videos from the usual home environment allowing the prospect of her debated thoughts to be considered and absorbed further.
Mean Tweet Wall
With any sort of movement there are groups and individual who will hate what you are trying to say. Feminists get abused daily online with uneducated comments to death threats. The Mean Tweet Wall is to show words have power and even when feminist are making a difference, they we always be hate lurking in the background.
Protest Signs
Every feminist movement have had a protest, in recent years groups such as, Slut Walks, No More Page Three and Femen have been protesting around the world. These are just a few groups that protest to inform the world that issues have to change and these words get exposed all over the world to get the messages across.
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