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

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13^th 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

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

click on image to see more from our workshop ‘B r a i n i n t h e B a r n’

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