The work of British Sculptor Anne Lydiat represents a contribution to the debates about contemporary practice when approximately in the early 1980’s women’s art moved from a marginal position on the centre of attention. Together with the post-modern pluralistic model, where there is not one unambiguous mainstream, but various alternatives are accepted. Art of those other than the white European, middle-class male, are claiming range of iconographic themes, stylistic characteristics or techniques, but out of this comes the art of women which enters the history alongside the art of the ’other’. 

The effort to portray ‘diversity’ is closely connected with the necessity to overcome social and cultural stereotypes. Anne Lydiat within the framework of her art chooses utilitarian objects with particular associative ties, in order to examine the notion of the female or male/female polarity. The traditional concept of the female role is projected in the form of a house, a pillow or an apron, etc.so that it is objects which belong to the so called female sphere. Everyday utility objects understood in connection with the banal, the marginal, the ‘low’ which are then placed in contrast with the ‘high’ in the sense of the hierarchies of ‘high art’ (its ideas, meanings and materials).

order to elevate craft over art. The metaphoric language of the utilitarian objects are used by her to gain legitimacy for the marginal, the disreputable, the ignored. In a work entitled ‘Weighed Down by Tradition’ 1995, three aprons are tied together, the pockets are filled with small pieces of Portuguese marble, are ambivalent objects referring to the tradition of sculpture and to the usage of such ‘noble’ sculpting materials as marble. Other possible interpretations lead to issues of soft and hard sculptural materials and the level of context where the ‘low’ to ‘high’, functional, to non functional a, points, points to the questioning of traditional ideas about the world, established social order and hierarchies.

In. her most recent exhibition ‘Salt of the Earth’, Gallery Medium, Bratislava, February 1996 the entire installation was created in the gallery space. Here the apron was used as a symbol of labour, particularly the male professions, but also making reference to the role of women – mother and artists in order to link together art, craft and life and explore the flexibility of the limits of the creative process with the possible overspill into different spheres.

Mária Orišková