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Women’s Work was
initiated by artist Izita
Kerr as a platform for women artists to explore the issues of
everyday life through their art, through annual exhibitions which are timed
to approximately coincide with International Women’s Day on 8th March, and
which are accompanied by community events such as workshops for families and
children. The exhibitions have received much critical acclaim for the wealth
of talent, vitality and innovation that they attract from artists all over
this country and abroad. click
on images for details of the Women’s Work team Email Women’s Work |
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13th Annual Exhibition L i t t l e W o m e n ! The Willis Museum,
Basingstoke 17-28 March 2009
Themes in the past have
included both the personal and the socially orientated: for example ‘Positive
Women’ explored issues of HIV and human rights; ‘Identity’ considered issues
of both personal and community identity both stable and unstable; ‘Mother’
and ‘Secrets’ focused on more intimate relationships between friends and
within the family; and ‘Renewal’ was concerned in a more mythical way with
problems of regeneration in situations of death or decadence, both
environmental and spiritual. This year the show is
unthemed, and very small scale works are invited which can be enclosed within
CD cases. Other than this there is no restriction on the medium. The
workshops with young people will follow the same pattern. Application form click here Fact sheet click here |
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The 2008 exhibition was entitled I n s i d e O u t and was held in Winchester at two venues: the Theatre
Royal and the Link Gallery |
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click on image to see more from our
workshop ‘B r a i n i n t h e
B a r n’ |
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P r
e s s R e l e a s e f o r ‘I n s i d e
O u t’ This is the
twelfth year of the Women’s Work exhibition, the platform for women artists
to explore the issues of everyday life through their art that was originally
founded by Basingstoke artist Izita Kerr (a graduate of Winchester School of
Art) to celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March. This year work is
being shown at 2 venues each with their own distinct character – the
Theatre Royal and the Link Gallery. The theme is the intriguing one of
`Inside Out’ and has attracted a large number of submissions from all over
the country and from abroad, interpreted in a variety of ingenious and subtle
ways and in a wide combination of media – painting, photography,
printmaking, textiles and small sculpture. Narrative and
emotional interpretations feature prominently amongst the thematic responses
to ‘Inside Out’: a ‘shout’ of frustration versus ‘contemplation’; emergence
from inside the body as represented by framed mother-daughter dresses, or a
painting of birds looking at their eggs, and other works telling
physiological stories invisible to the naked eye, such as a fascinating
series of etchings about conception in which the egg-protagonist is ‘caught’
in fallopian tubes. The ‘dreams
of children’ are depicted through a reversal of tones. Other species of emotional inside-out
reversal are presented by photos of a wedding dress spattered with mud
indicative of the tension between culture and nature; a galactic narrative
called ‘A question of scale’; Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden; and
poignant images of ‘ghost houses’ and of ‘walls of silence’. On similar
narrative lines, but more social than personal, there are some interesting
documentary pieces, including ‘inside the war zone’ a powerful
paint-and-newspaper collage of a woman’s face, and portraits of transgender
men from an ostracised Indian community outside the social norms. Humour finds
a voice in a print-collage of a robot family displaying their insides, in a
small photographic series based on a bath by the seashore, and in some
visceral-fantastic drawings grotesquely imaging bodily contortions. Other artists
have approached the theme from a purely aesthetic point of view, interfacing
shapes or styles, sometimes in an abstract way as in a concave-convex
sculpture called ‘Absconditis’, and sometimes figuratively, as with the tight
solidity of a small fruit bowl painted in old-master style that opens
sideways into a Chagall-like expanse of floaty flowers. The properties of a window, as the
interface between inside and outside have been exploited in several ways
– from a painting of ‘condensation’, through straight photography to
double-exposures that bring together familiar and exotic street scenes. Using the craft of sewing, negative
spaces are made from shapes stitched on a black; and leaves are taken from
inside a book to reform as ‘Folds, Fan and Stitch’. In printmaking several artist have used embossing to
create a surface dialogue with the subject matter, as with a boat-shaped
container of birds about to fly, and a display of everyday objects entitled
‘Make do and mend’ that comprises a visual list of the contents of three
containers. A paper sculpture
made from cutting into a ‘Glamour’ magazine deconstructs the surface image on
the cover. There are
also some fascinating architectural and archaeological interpretations,
including a textile representation of ‘Erosion’; the contours of a groyne
captured in a carborundum print; a model Silbery Hill longbarrow made from
earth pigments; some larger-than-life dress patterns; and a splendid
perspective drawing entitled ‘glass’ in which vanishing points pull one
another out as through a mirror. The small
cabinets in the Link venue contain some exquisite artefacts in wire and
glass, wax, ceramic and plaster – such as a row of casts of the inside
of children’s shoes. Finally, to
accompany the exhibition, Viables artist Pauline Pepper organized a phenomenal hands-on
‘Brain in the Barn’ week for children aged 5 to 18 (and their parents),
ending up with a hugely popular Community Art Show on 23 February at the
Viables Craft Centre in Basingstoke.
Images click here |
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