Cover Her Head

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Finished the Pop Up exhibition, in partnership with Jenny Butcher.She was exploring the “ties” that get severed and fragmented by adoption. It was excellent to have the time and space to develop a piece of work together.
I had to write a statement which was a challenge……
The Ties that Bind
This installation constructed by Jenny Butcher and Glen Gerrard explores ties that bind society together.
Humans are social animals and look for groups to join, identify with, to improve their chances of survival and development
become prey.
To become an acceptable member of the cultural group each society requires that women dress according to cultural expectation. Women’s dress is judged; she should be feminine, attractive and available but not too female; attract too much attention or look as if she is “up for it”.
To represent this dilemma I chose the symbol of the Maypole because it was for many years the dance that young virgins would compete to join each spring.
It can be seen as a pretty celebration of pleasure and freedom, but the girls are entangled in the ribbons [in my imagination] so they have to dance in circles, going nowhere, round and round, repeating the same steps, for the pleasure of the on-lookers.
To me this represents the cultural expectations that can trap women [in this case], the wish to comply, co-operate, become part of the group that signals acceptance, togetherness, success.
To dance to the tune of patriarchal society.
The figures wear skirts that are fragments of fabric designed by fashion guru Zandra Rhodes. Colourful and light [indeed covering lampshades, hiding the light?] very expensive. The creativity of Rhodes becomes the fashion industry’s uniform, a camouflage for the individual.
The ribbons to the Maypole are strips cut from re-cycled and re-dyed silk saris, similarly bright and light but meant to cover and hide the female shape, from head to toe, from public gaze.
The repeated faces are printed on pizza bases, the food of the over-weight while the figures are striving to be fashionably thin, so thin their ribs dominate.
And obviously, the phallic symbol/Maypole is the elephant in the room.

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My Maypole women do not have partners, they dance round and round alone yet together, but tied to the pole . A dance that was repeated each Spring, colourful celebratory yet somehow spooky.

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Still working on our Pop Up exhibition 10 Together to be ready for Monday week! I have enjoyed making the skirts for the Maypole dancers from reclaimed paper lamp shades {a bit raggetty with age and me hitting them when throwing the ball for the dog} now cut in half and patched with fabric scraps and wall paper paste. They now look quite jaunty and hold their shape..
The scraps are mostly pieces of Zandra Rhodes fabrics which seems appropriate to the theme of women [in this case] bound by cultural expectations of looking happy and fashionable, yet sometimes aware that the dance has trapped them..
My printed pizza faces need some work however, perhaps they should all be the same, to emphasise uniformity, Stepford wives, but they do not satisfy yet.
I would like to add LED lights in the dark room, to emphasise the false gaiety, reminiscent of Xmas, constantly acquiring more sparkly stuff to show everyone how happy we are.
Matisse dancers should not come to mind, as they are all supple and full of movement. Maybe The nightmarish dancers of Edvard Munch.Or the fairy tale figures of Paula Rego, ordinary yet full of menace.

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Have been experimenting with printing from lino cuts on pizza polystyrene bases to provide faces for my Maypole Ladies. The base takes the ink well, if I had more time I could paper the walls with screaming faces……but have to use energy wisely, as polymyalgia means I am exhausted after an hour or so.
I am constructing the Ladies forms with wire, plus lampshade skirts, all a bit Fred Karnos, but we will see. I would like to make their hugely expensive status handbags but I am not sure how to achieve them, in the time scale…..2 weeks at most. It is fun/fear to have this focus, I always enjoy making 3D responses to my imagination, although this is supposed to be a Drawing based challenge. I am drawing in three dimensions perhaps.
I saw a short film on Sarah Lucas this week, she and her work come across as so strong and carefree. ossibly her sense of humour will subvert her position as one of the “important”artists, but she subverts the Art elite anyway. She does not make women “victims” but talks all the time of gender politics and allows women to see themselves as they could be free of cultural expectations of femininity and compromise.