4. Collaboration

4.1   A Statement on 'Women and Work':

Kay Hunt lived for many years on St Marys Road. I believe she taught art at Southwark College. Recently I came across this statement made with the artist Margaret Harrison, that recalled my conversations with her:

“Women and Work occupies the major section of this exhibition. As it is seen here in the context of a one person show, we wish to emphasise for the sake of clarity, history and education and collaboration, that the work was a three-way partnership and is not the work solely of Mary Kelly.

As the label indicates this work belongs to all three artists who came into the project from differing perspectives. The context for Mary Kelly's involvement is explored in the accompanying publication and in the exhibition as a whole. Our own involvement is stated in the text which is reproduced and available as a leaflet.”

http://www.norwichgallery.co.uk/gallery/archive/ex2000/pages/kelly.html  (07.2011)

4.2  Margaret Harrison

Margaret Harrison was born in Wakefield, England in 1940. In 1957 she began attending classes at Carlisle College of Art. At both Carlisle and then later at the Royal Academy School in London she studied painting. Harrison became steeped in the influences of Pop art, and was greatly influenced by Feminism of the 1970s.

From her first exhibition, Harrison has been a controversial artist, even provoking legal action. Her first solo exhibition in 1971 contained drawings that blurred gender boundaries and satirized representations of women in the media.

See: Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry, 1973-5

4.3 Collective

Southwark Flashers was a London based collective, originally made up of ten socialist feminists working in education and media, who held a documentary photographic exhibition Women and Work in 1975, followed by venues across the UK and abroad.

They disseminated their work through trades union, community and women’s events, and in the feminist and socialist press, deliberately choosing to place their work in political rather than art contexts (Betterton 2010: 2)

Rosemary Betterton (2010)‘Embarrassment: Feminist Art & Maternal Affects’   Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010, http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/

4.4 Solidarity

From a postcard (allegedly from a M.Kelly to addressee M. Harrison):

You say Not And, But ...   (this part totally erased) You forget all the women artists who work alongside you, in your shadow and in solidarity with you…   In sisterhood

4.5   The Seventies

Lena Simic (2010) The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home presents Affective Exchange of Labour between Invisible Mother and Underpaid Au Pair

Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk

'In the late 1980s a practising painter who is also a practising psychoanalyst reflected upon the significance of events occurring in her painting and being reflected upon in her notebooks to evolve a major theoretical intervention in psychoanalytical thinking at the intersections of British Object Relations (Bion, Laing, Winnicott) in which she was trained at the Tavistock and Parisian Lacanian and post Lacanian thinking (Laplanche, Guattari, Aulagnier, Dolto).  Supplementing the  then dominant understanding of Lacan's phallic Symbolic,  defined by the sovereignty of the phallus as the sole signifier, Bracha Ettinger proposed a further symbol, the Matrix and its non-phallic, non-Oedipal process, metramorphosis.  The matrixial enables us to catch up into theoretical knowledge another, shifting but not excluding dimension of  subjectivity that is the effect , on all subjects, irrespective of later, Oedipalised gender or sexuality, of the  feminine sexual specificity of human generation in the non-prohibited intimacy of the feminine-becoming-maternal-in co-emergence-with an-unknown-becoming-partial-other.  Moving beyond the theoretical engagements of object relations with early mother-child, hence post-natal relations between subjects, hence beyond intersubjectivity, Ettinger has been exploring, for almost two decades, the implications for theories of subjectivity and hence for ethics and even the politics of our multiple moments of transsubjective co-affections and co-effects, of the proposition that the feminine, understood as this sexual specificity of the severality of mutual co-effecting becoming of life, has something profound to offer our understanding of the human, its ethics, aesthetics and even politics.' 

http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/back_issues/issue_one/griselda_pollock_abstract.html