Shoulder to Shoulder is part performance piece, part psychological portrait.

The Suffragette movement provides the historical backdrop for my social and personal investigation of disorder, characterized by a disquiet sensed both in and around me. When the ‘state of things’ adversely affects ones mental health it is hard to unravel what is within and what without.

My jumping off point for these works was the Velázquez painting ‘The Rokeby Venus’, a painting that intrigued me and one which, (following a history of performance in my practice) I would restage with Venus Vanitas. In researching the work I discovered that in 1914 as it hung in the National Gallery in London, the Suffragette Mary Richardson took an axe to it and slashed it several times. Through the colour photo works in this series, the painting itself and this violent event in its hidden-history, were used to examine my own confusion over my various roles and their relative importance: artist, woman, citizen.

Slasher Mary’s act of destruction elicited contradictory responses in me. In her autobiography Laugh a Defiance she wrote: “Values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human. I felt I must make my protest from the financial point of view, therefore, as well as letting it be seen as a symbolic act.” But this was not just the destruction of property; it was the destruction of particular kind of property, art. Such an act, in a context in which I believed in the struggle, unnerved me and raised further questions regarding the making of art in relation to values, both economic and moral.

In the Contact Sheet work I used the Suffragette prison uniform as a means of role-playing, in order to investigate notions of active citizenship. Dressed as a Suffragette Prisoner I walked the streets of London handing out flyers printed with their mantra Deeds not Words. Turned away by the National Gallery security I paced the balcony holding the flyer then moved to Trafalgar Square (detail 1). In Contact Sheet II I play both roles, Suffragette and dropout, a performance of two halves where action challenges ambivalence. Contact Sheet III documents my participation in a Climate Change demonstration as I accompanied the protesters on their march and crowds of shoppers observed us from the sidelines.

Disorder describes a state, the state of a nation, a state of mind. It can also be a political decision. Shoulder to Shoulder is an attempt to understand the role of the individual within the continuum of stasis, change and the sustainability of personal integrity.

Exhibited at:

2016

Playing and Reality, Fotofurum Cologne, Germany

Liberties, The Exchange Gallery, Penzance

2015

Liberties, launch of A Womans Place, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London

2012

Shoulder to Shoulder, Deptford X Festival, London

2011

Shoulder to Shoulder,   Matt Roberts Gallery, London