‘Waiting for the Seventh Wave’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (1987)

Artists Statement

I remember distinctly the excitement I felt as I put the final touches to my degree show at Sheffield, June 1981. It was the culmination of three years intense personal and intellectual change. Each one of my sculptures, or so I thought, was a self-contained entity, fragments of experience externalised in three dimensions. In a sense, this was true. What I had. Not been prepared for was that the fragments when juxtaposed, formed a whole picture, like the pieces of a jigsaw. The satisfaction of ‘fitting in’ the last piece revealed an unforeseen vulnerability. This completed picture was a celebration of personal experiences in visual form, a three-dimensional journal which I suddenly hoped no-one would read too carefully. What I omitted to take into account, along with those feelings, was that the work had a ‘formal’ language sophisticated enough to transcend the purely personal and to communicate to those wishing to engage with the work, on many different levels. It is with similar feelings of anticipation and excitement that I. now prepared for my forthcoming show, ‘Waiting for the Seventh Wave’. However, as my ideas have grown, the personal fragments of experience within the work are now more concealed, for example, in the patchworks where pieces of material are juxtaposed to make a whole.

I was originally inspired by the minimalists but wanted to contextualise my work more specifically with a women’s tradition of making. (I called this fusion ‘feminalism’) The patchwork quilt became the vehicle to link these two seemingly disparate traditions together.

This also enabled me to link the personal with the political, a truly ‘subversive stitch’ which is personified in the three pieces ‘The Art of Craft’, ‘The Craft of Art’ and ‘Inside, Outside’ where I deliberately link the ‘exalted’ tradition of Fine Art painting to the tradition of embroiders, using the painting stretcher and the embroidery hoop as a symbolic metaphor.  Naturally, I am aware of the current polemic, amongst women artists in particular who are critical of any attempts to ‘debase’ women’s art practice by linking it with the craft tradition. My concern, however, is not to ‘elevate’ the craft tradition to that of Fine Art but to demonstrate that the two traditions for me are inextricably bound and share equal status.

The utilisation of the house shape in the recent sculptures initially evolved out of a purely formal geometric arrangement. This again placed my work within the Minimalist philosophy of truth to materials like a set of children’s building blocks, to construct an idea. The evocative materials soon presented a series of autobiographical possibilities through this formal exploration. The series of Apron pieces (the severance of the apron strings) and the symbol of the House (which is no longer a home), all serve to convey my sense of dislocation from the ‘Home Front’.

April 1987