Convergence

Carmen van Huistedde on the sculpture pathway asked me to co-curate an exhibition with her.  She wanted to do something which celebrated some of the women artists in our MA cohort, their creativity and the support networks and friendships that have grown during the course.  She had been inspired by our own friendship, which started on a foundation course at Morley in 2018, and my collaboration with Joy for the MA Show.   In a slightly arbitrary way, we invited the group of peers we were having lunch with to take part – I like this sense of happy accident, which is a feature of printmaking, and working with what you have.  But I also identified two classmates whose work explore feminist ideas – around landscape and the body; and the hidden history of women’s lives – and asked them to participate. We made this decision on 19th September and Carmen had booked the A-B Gallery for 3 days, starting on 19th October.

The gallery is quite a difficult space: it is literally a corridor, with doors, windows, lifts all opening on to the space and filled with the essentials of the institution: fire extinguishers, fire exit signs, bins, electrical cabling and sockets. In addition, the lighting is limited to overhead spots – and the nature of the space as a corridor means it is not possible to have trailing cables and so on.

But we managed to pull the show together quickly, very much leaving individual artists to submit what work they wanted.  It was important to me to have some information about the artists and the works, because the themes in common that did emerge – embodiment, feminism, memory, nature  - were important to an understanding of the collection.  So we invited participants to provide a few sentences and then were careful to position these notes in ways that didn’t draw attention away from the works.

We had to paint two walls in the space white – three coats to cover up the dark green that had gone up for the degree show in July – and find a way to cover or draw attention away from the bank of power sockets that went right across the middle of one of the major walls. Once this was done, we took only two or three hours to install.

I felt that we had done a good job with a difficult space that imposed real constraints on us.  There was a sense of flow from one part of the space to another and I felt that we positioned the works so that they worked together, not in opposition – even though we had some pieces, including mine, that were much quieter and smaller than most. Although the exhibition was fleeting, it did feel celebratory and supportive - I think it might have solidified and strengthened some of the existing relationships: certainly I will be confident of teamwork and success participating in a future exhibition that involves any of this group of artists.