weaving women

This ongoing series of expanded drawing explores how women have always been present as artists but not necessarily represented within the canon of Western art history, while exploring identity within the current discourse about women’s art.

As a modern-day flaneuse, I walked through a range of art galleries and museums observing and recording the gender imbalance on display. Through a process of mapping floor plans of a number of major galleries, this series creates a visual representation of the gender balance of artists exhibited within national and international cultural institutions.

Each title number refers to the percentage of female artists represented within a gallery or exhibition with floor plans taking the form of woven shapes as an homage to the Bauhaus weaving masters Gunta Stolzl, Anni albers and the women who worked in the successful weaving workshop. From its establishment in Weimar in 1919, while the Bauhaus offered courses in many different specialities the weaving workshop remained one of the few options open to women applying to study there, regardless of their artistic discipline.

While this series of self-portraits is foremost a qualitative research project, with yellow as a visual representation of women artists, for me the act of weaving and the textile medium also act as an antidote to the harsh results and reality of the outcomes. This work considers ways of being beyond the aetiology of masculinity.

the garden house

Commissioned artwork for a carpet, handwoven by Designer Rugs. 12 colours were selected and blended together, interpreting the movement I captured on my mobile phone from a train window in Japan. This has been an opportunity to play with scale and materiality, providing a sense of being ‘in’ the artwork when sitting or lying down on the tactile surface.