A colour photograph hangs at eye level, of a middle aged woman seated on a child's ceramic potty. Her body is stooped and twisted in shame, face lost in shadow, girlish white knickers bunched around bare ankles. Behind her, scuffed floorboards, a bannister worn with age, the bumps and bruises of family life. This is the excavation of human trauma in the name of healing and of art.

2012 is the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jo Spence. By way of homage SPACE, London and Studio Voltaire have collaborated to create a two part exhibition that chronologically spans the artist's career. As a key component of Spence's modus operandi was collaboration, this synergy feels right.

Part II takes place off Clapham High Street and covers the period 1982 to 1992. The subject matter is Spence's cancer diagnosis, her subsequent journey into the world of holistic health care and the pioneering photo therapy that makes up the greater part of her best known work.

For Spence, photo therapy meant using the camera to heal herself within the broader context of psychoanalysis. It was a process she undertook with photographer Rosy Martin and through which they both discovered that 'there is no single self, but many fragmented selves, each vying for conscious expression, many never acknowledged.'

Coming into dialogue with the fragmented selves became a means of self-empowerment and of moving towards health; a way of rejecting existing mythologies and the systems of hegemony and dominance that spawned them, yet without creating new ones in which to get lost once more. It was a way of acknowledging her own constantly shifting totality.

One set of photo-theraputic works is devoted to the re-enactment by Spence of various moments in the life of her mother. Putting herself into her mother's position, she reported, made her feel guilty for the way she had behaved towards her mother when she was alive. This material is so raw and so emotionally fraught it may begin to explain why work of such evident potency has been almost totally overlooked by the existing art establishment. The exhibitions at SPACE and Studio Voltaire are her first retrospective in London. The Victoria & Albert is the only public collection in England to include her work and that by donation. As Spence herself once observed: “breaking out is not painless for anybody.”

The work on show at Studio Voltaire evidences her rejection of the cult of the artist. She employs a democratising technique of willed amateurishess, even abandoning the title 'artist', envisioning herself instead as 'cultural sniper', capable of appearing anywhere and in any guise. Her work is more commonly laminated than framed, giving the exhibition an awkward, community centre feel. Yet Spence's output is steeped in theory, amalgamating the academic with lived experience.

In 1991, having contracted leukaemia, she began The Final Project: A Photo fantasy and Photo therapeutic Exploration of Life and Death. She spoke of a crisis of representation. “I have not the faintest idea how to represent leukaemia except for how I feel.”

In one self-portrait from this series, traces of dark hair creep out from behind the toothy grimace of a rubber death mask, whilst over one black-clad shoulder a large wicker shopping bag nonchalantly hangs. The power of Spence's work is in its directness. She projects the strength of an army with the sensitivity of a butterfly. This confrontation drags death into life rather than the other way around. And not just into her life, into ours as well.

It may seem that Spence's political engagement, her socialist and feminist sympathies and the documentation of her difficulties with the NHS during what she parenthetically referred to as 'the cuts', could lodge her intensely auto-biographical work into a time specific niche outside of which it lacks resonance. This show at Studio Voltaire dispels that myth. Spence uses the deeply personal nature of experience as a means of accessing the universal. She presents us with the inescapable facts of all our lives – childhood, ageing, illness, death - and she does so without cliché. It is the brutal honesty with which she casts the objective gaze upon her own life that makes this exhibition so important and so long overdue.

Jo Spence

WORK (Part II)

Studio Voltaire

13 June to 11 August 2012

There is a notion within certain segments of the contemporary art community that in order to be 'serious' a contemporary artist must bleed their work dry of any hint of wit. That humour is somehow a sign of weakness and that poe faced gravitas, at all times, is the only sure fire indicator of heavy weight sagacity.

This is a notion of such literal minded stupidity it beggars belief. It seems to me that only a mind blinded by its own desperate craving for acceptance could possibly entertain the concept that the conscious performance of seriousness and seriousness itself are one and the same thing. In actual fact there is nothing more profound than hilarity because only a joke can hold the tragedy of life. Only a joke can mirror society's ridiculousness back at itself without invoking its rage.

Legend has it that when Sadie Hennessy was studying at Central St Martin's in 2010 it was suggested to her by her tutors that her work would be improved if she removed the humour from it. Thank god she had the wit to give that lamentable advice the finger. Because her first solo show with WW Gallery is embalmed in wit. And it is brilliant.

Humour is also - I'd like to point out to the great burghers of Central St Martin's - a tool that's been claimed and re-claimed by feminist artists for the last fifty years. VALIE EXPORT, Margaret Harrison, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Sylvie Fleury, The Guerrilla Girls, Sarah Lucas, Sarah Maple, Mel Brimfield, even Tracey Emin, have all engaged humour to make a space for themselves that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. So I think it's safe to say that Ms Hennessy is working within a tradition.

If female sexuality is slowly, slowly beginning to emerge from the dark cave of it's own taboo (Caitlin Moran talking about her first wank without alienating her entire public was a great right of passage for that one) the one thing that without a doubt remains universally horrifying is the sexuality of older women. It might be just about ok for a 23 year old girl to be a sexually empowered entity but by 63 or 53 or even 43, she's expected to have become dormant. We don't mind a sex kitten but nobody's interested in the cat.

Sadie Hennessy tackles this issue with elegance in her sculptural assemblage Big Night Out (2012) a zimmer frame 'wearing' a pair of black sequined ankle-wedge boots and with a black sequined heart shaped handbag hanging over the top of the frame. It speaks to the invisibility of the older lady and the fact that if she's not invisiblised altogether, she is, at the very least, desexualised. Too old to be virgin or whore, she becomes mother / grandmother / crone. As one ages it seems one's life can be expected to progress from one cardboard cliché to the next. Big Night Out reveals the humanity of this older lady, her vulnerability. The absolute universalism of wanting to be loved. There's not a man or woman alive who can't relate to that.

Also good is the Lost Art of Keeping A Secret (Porn Star Eyes) series of cut outs, in which porn star eyes are collaged onto fresh, smily faced 1950s beauties. Reminiscent of one of my favourite artists, the pioneering photomontagist and early feminist Hannah Hoch, these works are laugh out loud funny on first viewing but, as with much of Hennessy's work, gradually expose a melancholic underbelly as the viewer lingers. Both the porn star and the fresh faced beauty come to seem trapped within the performativity of the societal roles they each have necessarily embraced.

After Sadie Hennessy I went across town to another Sadie. Ms Coles has just opened John Currin's lastest show. If anyone should question why Sadie Hennessy feels she needs to be so outré in the conveyance of her feelings about female sexuality and female objectification in this age of supposed equality and respect I would suggest they might try the same. What John Currin seems to be getting away with in 2012 in the name of art is frankly totter inducing. Has fifty years of feminist art history by-passed the man or does he simply not care? Oh for the day when the sort of shit he's producing is taboo and Ms Hennessy is commanding his prices. Then we'll be able to talk about equality without having to laugh our arses off in the process.


written for Spoonfed

In 1952, in the wake of her father's death, Louise Bourgeois began therapy with the Freudian psychoanalyst Dr Henry Lowenfeld. She was to continue to see him, three times a week, for thirty years. It is probably impossible to over estimate the influence this must have had on her life and work. And yet it was not until 2004 that her long time assistant Jerry Gorovoy unearthed two large boxes full of hand written notes made in response to the treatment, notes she had previously kept hidden.

The exhibition at the Freud Museum, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed was inspired by those notes. It is an intimate enquiry into the extent to which art was itself a transformative, therapeutic tool for the artist who more than once asserted: “art is a guarantee of sanity, that is the most important thing I have said.”

Featured in the exhibition are some of the works upon which Louise Bourgeois's reputation as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century are founded. Femme-Couteau / Knife-Woman was a motif the artist returned to again and again across her seventy year artistic life span. It appears here in the form of a vitrined blancmange pink, near life-sized figure with half a leg and both arms missing. From the neck a long, rusty knife emerges, floating horrifically and menacingly over the soft fabric body.

Next door, in the rarefied, near holy atmosphere of Freud's study, the room in which he conducted his talking cure some seventy years ago, Janus Fleuri hangs over the couch, a revolting, flaccid, apparently decomposing sexual organ of neither specifically male nor female origin, cast in bronze. Its eloquent placement reminds the viewer of Freud's and Bourgeois's and perhaps by default our own preoccupation with sex. In its shadow a powerful, almost mocking flavour of failure and dissatisfaction is cast over the hallowed space.

In the garden lurks Maman, the giant arachnid for which the artist is probably most widely known. Although we are often told that Maman represents the safe and protective influence of the mother that Bourgeois claimed to love, I wonder if I can be alone in finding it repulsive, alive with the terrifying primitive horror that exists outside words.

Before her death in 2010, Ms Bourgeois's permission was sought and granted to display her psychoanalytic notes alongside the work. What the notes bring is evidence of her humble and humbling self-awareness, the minute by minute battle to remain engaged, to look at that which would be so much more easily swept under the carpet, in order to transform or transcend it.

“I have failed as a wife, as a woman, as a mother, as a hostess, as an artist, as a business woman, as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister. I have not failed as a truth seeker...”

These are not the words of an unhappy or depressed woman, they are the words of a brave woman, a woman bold enough to stare into the void and have it stare back at her. Only such a woman could smile as she spoke the words: 'I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you, it was wonderful.'

Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed
Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith
Freud Museum Hampstead
8 March 2012 to 27 May 2012

written for This is Tomorrow

Review by Mark Sherrin of It's Just Like Any Other Job Really (Dedicated to World Peace) a live art performance that took place at La Scatola Gallery on Friday 30 March

www.criticismism.com

Thank you to all the wonderful Ms Worlds: Gabriela Belard, Angine Bines, Terri Bryan, Rachel DiBaiso, Natasha Chamberlain-Kent, Veronika Chapman, Rebecca Coates, Olenka Cogias, Tamsin Cotsell, Michelle Egan, Jess Ettridge, Kate Fidczuksterry, Amy Forrest, Liepa Grigaite, Kelley Griffiths, Holly Hardy, Laura Heckford, Holly Howe, Emer Hutton, Kayleigh King, Isabella Lopez-Smith, Adriana Martinez, Alisha Palmer, Katy Pike, Madeleine Scott Cree, Lisa Selby, Nikita Todd, Sarah Vero, Thaires Vicentini, Irina Yordanova. Also thanks to Tom O'Dwyer, Marguerite Horner, Nicky Wasserman, Jamie Harrison, Aisha and to La Scatola Gallery.

"I don't know whether these chick are hot or not." Brilliant

Excerpts from The Diary of Miss World...

October
Today was my first day as Miss World and time to meet the press! I am still a little amazed at what has happened to me. It is sinking in more now but when I spoke to my family last night, it was an incredible feeling. My family got together to watch the Final on TV and my mum called me right after. She was so excited and there was shouting and celebrations in the background. I went online to speak with friends and suddenly everyone was there waiting for me. I couldn’t believe how many people were congratulating me at once. They even managed to bring my two dogs to the camera. I am looking forward to what the following days will bring, and I am excited to see what lies in store for me for the year ahead!

November
Since being crowned Miss World In October, I have been so very busy. Each morning I attend an English teaching school near to where I'm staying in London, spending four hours a day in an intense English class learning the language at a rapid pace. I'll be returning home at the end of the month! Getting home and seeing my people, for me, is the first part of this journey. Then, I'll be embarking on my ‘Beauty with a Purpose’ journey around the world in the New Year, which I am so incredibly excited about. Now I can begin helping all those disadvantaged people around the world and raise money for good causes. My aim is to raise a record amount!

February
I have been so busy, already I have visited some incredible places and have met some wonderful people, from many different cultures and backgrounds. I visited Russia and had a few days of sightseeing in Moscow, starting at the Kremlin, the residence of the President of the Russian Federation.

March
I was lucky enough to be travelling again and started my trip around Cambodia this month, it has been amazing. The people are so warm and friendly, I have been made to feel welcome everywhere I go. I looked around the museums and also attended a theatre performance with everyone in full costume. It was so colourful! I will leave Cambodia with so many happy memories

July
I have had a really good time during my stay in China this week. I was on stage for the signing ceremony announcing the Miss World 2010 Final to take place in Sanya. I had never seen so many journalists and photographers at a press conference before! I gave a speech at the conference and told the reporters that I am delighted that the Final will be held in Sanya as I really like it there. The people are nice and friendly, the beaches are amazing, and I think the Miss World contestants who will be travelling there this year will love it as much as I do. I also had the pleasure of taking a trip to Ordos, one of the key destinations in this year’s contest. I received a very warm welcome, and everyone there was happy to see me, with a special dinner given to mark the visit. I am looking forward to returning there already. While I will be sad as my Miss World experience will soon be coming to a close, I am very happy that the place to end my year will be Sanya.

www.sarahmaple.com / www.beverleyknowles.com / www.lascatolagallery.com

Exchange
La Scatola Gallery
1 Snowden Street, EC2A 6DQ
Monday 26 March to Friday 30 March

Friday 30 March
main happening 6.00-8.30pm
It's Just Like Any Other Job Really (Dedicated to World Peace)
a live art project by artist Sarah Maple and writer / curator Beverley Knowles



Artist Sarah Maple and writer / curator Beverley Knowles will be taking part in a week-long series of talks and performances at La Scatola Gallery wherein developments and trends in contemporary art will be explored.

On Friday 30 March they will present It's Just Like Any Other Job Really (Dedicated to World Peace), a collaborative performance influenced by feminist and non-feminist art history, particularly the performative works of artists such as VALIE EXPORT, Carolee Schneeman, Marina Abramovich, Tehching Hsieh and Andrea Fraser. Dedicated to World Peace also makes particular reference to Santiago Sierra's Group of Persons Facing a Wall, a provocative work staged at Tate Modern on 21 April 2008.

Dedicated to World Peace investigates relationships between women through the metaphor of the annual Miss World competition, which extraordinarily outmoded pageant continues to roll on year after year. It will highlight the cliches and stereotypes of what is seen to constitute 'femininity', of what it is to be a woman in 2012. However, the piece does not wish to engage a reductive or didactic view of feminism and gender roles but rather seeks to ask questions about the binary position of gender - performance verses essence. It is also interested in issues of choice or lack there of.

Influenced by artists such as Jeremy Deller and John Gerrard, Sarah Maple and Beverley Knowles wish to abnegate individual authorship and present the piece as a group collaboration between themselves and the participants in this faux Miss World. Upon entering the gallery the viewer also becomes an inadvertent participant in the competition for world supremacy.



It's Just Like Any Other Job Really (Dedicated to World Peace) is a collaboration between Sarah Maple, Beverley Knowles, Gabriela Belard, Angine Bines, Terri Bryan, Natasha Chamberlain-Kent, Veronika Chapman, Rebecca Coates, Olenka Cogias, Tamsin Cotsell, Rachel DiBaiso, Michelle Egan, Miriam Elia, Jess Ettridge, Kate Fidczuksterry, Amy Forrest, Liepa Grigaite, Kelley Griffiths, Bea Hamill, Holly Hardy, Laura Heckford, Holly Howe, Emer Hutton, Rachel James-Bailey, Hannah Catherine Jones, Kayleigh King,, Isabella Lopez-Smith, Adriana Martinez, Alisha Palmer, Katy Pike, Madeleine Scott Cree, Lisa Selby, Nikita Todd, Sarah Vero, Thaires Vicentini, Irina Yordanova and La Scatola Gallery

Forthcoming Performance / Sarah Maple / La Scatola Gallery

Sarah Maple at Aubin Gallery

Me and Maple on the Beeb!

Women and Art
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
to January 14th 2012

click here to read my review for The Economist

Newsflash folks... Feminism is cool! And the best thing is a Feminist doesn't have to be this way or that way or any other way. Nope, in 2011 there's no such thing as a Bad Feminist. You can be any way you want (except a tragic little misogenist!) and still be a Feminist.

For inspiration, just whilst you get your Feminist wheels oiled, here's are a few 'cool' styles out there.

There's Caitlin Moran's strident, funny, ladette How to be a Woman Feminism: “What is Feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be.” Woop.

There's Tracey Emin: “I know having a penis definitely affects your wage packet, but I’m not bitter and twisted. I’m grateful to all the women that work so hard to enable women like me to have a voice. And I’m still shouting.”

There's Lady Gaga's blue armpit-hair wearing Feminism: “I am a Feminist. And I want to change the way people view women.”

And now... there's Helen Carmel Benigson aka Princess Belsize Dollar.

Bigged up on these very pages back in July 2009 after I first spotted her at her Slade BA degree show, and now, just two and a bit years later she's solo-showing it around London, seducing from the pages of Vogue, noted as the one to watch in The Independent's list of successors to Hirst and Emin and performing at Frieze – in short, she's on the way to Made-It-Land.

To walk into The Future Queen of the Screen at ROLLO Contemporary is to walk into a palace, an homage, a (smallish) cathedral, to over the top, in-yer-face, girlie hyper-femininity. It's sassy, it's sharp, it's pop culture with a capital P. It's ironic and sincere, it's direct and abstruse, it's multi-narrated and multi-faceted. It's Benigson and it's Feminism and it's Now. It makes words like 'Girlfriend!' just want to spring right out of my mouth! It wears short-shorts, heart shaped sunglasses and hooped earrings the size of Saturn's Ring. Sometimes it even wears nothing. It flirts outrageously with men twice it's age, it swears in a squeaky little girl voice, it giggles about sushi and chocolate and guns and what's more, it apologises for none of it. It's reclaiming tits and arse with a raw, inimitable style all of its own. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's benign. If you cross it it'll deck you and no messing. It's Miss Piggy in a baseball cap and converse. It's Tracey Emin on speed with de Beauvoir on the side. In other words, it's totally awesome.

The Future Queen of the Screen features multi-layered video-work, print, photography, installation, sculpture, and performance, not to mention stools she's made for you to sit on whilst you watch it all unfold. At the opening she's upstairs rapping for the audience, whilst downstairs a live poker game is taking place. There's nothing she can't turn her hand to in weaving her intricate world of multi-identities and alter-egos. Even @PrincessBelsize crosses the line between reality and fantasy, virtual and actual, art and life. The morning after the opening she writes: “i loved all my sexy boy poker players and i love @gali223 the most xxxx”. Is this an artist remarking on her own private view or is this a work of art in itself?

As far as I can see there is no clear distinction between Helen Carmel Benigson and Princess Belsize Dollar, between her cousin who features in a lot of her work and looks almost indistinguishable from her, the avatar she's created of herself, Helen the academic, Helen the goddaughter of Tamar Garb, Helen the artist, Helen the girl, Helen the woman. It's a maze she leads us into, giggling and wiggling, and leaves us there, lost but amused. Her power is in that she subverts from within. It's not all cupcakes and thongs. Behind the frothy facade the questions she's posing are serious, intelligent and spot on.

It all reminds me of one of my favourite Feminist quote of all time by Mary Beth Edelson: “'The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.' To which I say: Fuck his house—who goes there anyway?" Benigson sure doesn't.



written for Spoonfed:
Future Queen of the Screen
at Rollo Contemporary Art
Until 13 January 2012

Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings
The Mayor Gallery, Cork Street
to 16 December 2011

click here to read my review for More Intelligent Life

Pipilotti Rist
Eyeball Massage
showing at Hayward until 8 January
Article commissioned by Artwrit whose much more professional edit you can read here: artwrit.com.
My unedit filed here just for a laugh and by kind permission of Artwrit...


Strings of greying underpants hang like washing on a line. A smoke filled bubble emerges from a machine that turns out to be Nothing, and wobbles away, goalless and gentle, seemingly out of place in this brutal environment. It bursts, a peace bomb or, in the artist's words, like a 'fart from within the trousers'. In a moment another one appears to take its place.

At first glance Pipilotti Rist's work appears fun, playful, a little absurd. On one level it is all of these things, on another it engages a meaningful existential investigation into what creates barriers and the ways in which those barriers may be peaceably transgressed. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's assertion that a serious philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Rist is a video artist who's working method is to transgress boundaries in terms of both the content and presentation of her work. There is an atmosphere of something deeply imaginative, free from the usual ways of being in and perceiving the world. “I tend to feel the video pieces inside myself,” the artist reveals. The statement inspires me and I want to know how these works feel inside me if I attempt to break the habit of a life time and engage them as much through my body as through my intellectualising, controlling mind.

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) is a five minute video played inside a conical structure protruding aggressively from the wall by several meters and into which I must insert my head via one of several holes. The encasement is entitled, significantly, A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East. The film shows what appears to be a semi-clad Rist frenzidly gyrating her body as though in trance-like ecstasy, chanting the words of the works title. The film speeds up, slows down, speeds up again, the image is variously distorted, the time continuum illusion well and truly messed with.


As with mantra the repetition of a single phrase over and over eventually tricks the power crazed discursive mind into releasing its vice like grip on our experience of the world and for a few moments the body is revealed as the existential mediator it is. Conversely, at that moment, my body is outside my experience of this world of the girl who doesn't miss much. My head, tucked safely inside the cone, my body elsewhere, missing. A sensation of dislocation arises in which I feel, curiously, safer, estranged from the vulnerabilising corporeality of my body's very apparent and very alarming, to the ego at least, impermanence. Je pense donc je suis, leaving me free to ignore the hints given by the slow disintegration of my body and those bodies around me, that this state of affairs will not continue indefinitely. Like the air bubble, I will soon be gone, replaced by another.

Blue Bodily Love Letter and Red Bodily Love Letter are two films in which the camera travels over a naked female form. For Rist the female body symbolises humanity, not so much sexuality, more innocence and a sense of coming home to oneself. This pair of works concern themselves with Love. Rist points out that in German to 'fall in love' is verlieben; liebe translates as 'love' but comes from the word lieben which means literally 'to embody'. The German speaking world then recognises, in the very structure of its language, that love arises and takes place within the body. Far from being a dangerous, contaminated place, the body is the very source of all that is good.

If the viewer seeks to interpret Rist's work on a purely intellectual or theoretical level he may find it lacking. Such a lack is not inherent in the work but in the method of engagement. This work gives most when it is engaged in the manner in which it was created: through a sensory, real-time investigation into the body. It seems to suggest that by embracing the wisdom and vulnerability of our bodies we may go beyond our corporeal, existential fear and thereby break down some of the barriers standing in the way of joyful inter-relationship.

This week I went to visit the studio of an artist whose work I'm curating in a solo show next year, details of which are still under wraps so I'd better not spill premature beans. Hopefully it's safe to mention that Sarah's studio is in the well know artistic hub of Crawley. Not having the first clue where Crawley is I imagined it was going to take me the best part of a day to get there, but Google Maps informed me its not so far past Cobham. So, I thought best thing in terms of time management and my latest quest to make myself a 'highly effective person' was to go after my riding lesson. All very efficient and satisfactory, but it did mean I had to walk round Crawley in riding jodhpurs, knee high black leather boots and an ageing baseball cap concealing stuck to the forehead sweaty riding helmet hair which was a bit self conscious making. Ms Maple though generously pretended not to notice.

Sarah Maple is a feminist artist. Only problem is no-one really knows what that means because nobody knows what a feminist is. No-one knows what an artist is either for that matter, or rather everybody does and nobody agrees. So to say someone is a feminist artist is just to append to them and their work a selection of letters that serve to create various impressions in various minds many of which will be at odds with whatever may or may not have been the intended impression.

The other way of doing it is to state what a feminist is not:



So that's cleared that up. Excellent.

Sarah's work uses humour to discuss sensitive subjects. The one thing we're never supposed to mention in polite society is the elephant in the room. But, like all artists of significance, Sarah doesn't allow herself to be limited by social niceties, that ugly, desperate, and largely successful attempt to control, shape and manipulate. Rather she just says it like she sees it.

Not everybody enjoys the joke. Consequently her 2008 solo show attracted some fairly robust criticism (click here, and don't miss the staggeringly eloquent Suad al-Attar. Good old Auntie scoured the globe twice over to come up with an art historical expert of that calibre. Thank goodness for the TV licence, hey.)

Luckily Sarah hasn't let that put her off. Rather she's spent the last two years creating an entirely new but equally uncompromising body of work for the forthcoming show. I can't wait. It's gonna be a cracker.

Sarah's work is currently forming the inaugural exhibition at Inception Gallery, Paris, in a show entitled Sarah Maple est Croque Madame.

I’ve lately developed a healthy obsession for the Greeks. Ancient that is, not modern. Bloodbaths, matricide, all powerful goddesses - what’s not to love? It’s archetypal stuff that anyone with any self-knowledge can probably relate to. Actually I seem to have discovered that even if you haven’t a great degree of self-knowledge – mine’s a bit thin on the ground I’m beginning to suspect, although that in itself seems to be a fairly good starting point on the basis that the minute you think you know is usually the exact minute you stop knowing – you can acquire some through reading these timeless stories and spotting your own habits in the character’s unfolding dramas.

We’ve all got goddess traits of one sort or another and it’s fun spotting your own, although I should confess I did get a bit of a hint on which mine might be from an American girlfriend who, upon hearing of my latest romantic nuclear meltdown, (and we are talking Chernobyl here, a Chernobyl of female rage and destructive indignation at perceived maltreatment of women in general and moi in particular, aka misogyny, from someone who’s public ‘spiritual’ face falsely suggests he should know better) asked me what was with me and my Artemis complex.

A lightbulb came on and I immediately remembered what had been my favourite painting when I worked for Anthony Mould in the late 90s – Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Lady Anne Dawson as the Goddess Diana, Diana being the Roman equivalent of the Greek Artemis.

I decided this must have been my subconscious identifying with the insignia of Diana the Huntress – the silver crescent moon in her hair, the adoring greyhound gazing up at her whilst she rests a gentle protective hand on its neck, not to mention the enviable antique rose coloured silk gown with plunging, but not immodest, décolletage.

It was like suddenly coming across my best friend and mirror image – a perhaps slightly over competitive, but in its positive manifestation highly focused, nocturnal, animal lover and somewhat aloof feminist loner who keeps a strong army of female friends and a strict approach to the kind of behaviours she expects from her male partner, i.e. a bit of respect if you don’t mind, otherwise there’ll be trouble. Oh, and a nice line in feminine rage with which to drum up aforementioned trouble as needed.

There’s one particularly amusing story about Diana inadvertently shooting dead her lover, Orion, from some miles distance, when her brother, Apollo, challenged her skills with the bow and arrow. After all, who can resist a good challenge?

Another woman who had more than a little Diana about her was ground breaking photographer and Suffragette Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) who’s most famous quote is the nervous-makingly astringent: ‘be original or die’. Quite right, tell it like it is and no messing.


Madame Yevonde was one of the key pioneers of colour photography. At a time when photographers and public alike were so used to seeing the world reproduced in black and white that the new fangled colour version was met with some hostility, Madame Yevonde was flying the flag for the new with alacrity.

Possibly one of her most important bodies of work is the Goddesses series part of which is currently showing at the PM Gallery in Ealing. Here you’ll find her work hung along side a photographic portrait project by contemporary artist Neeta Madahar, which is a shame in a way because Neeta’s work doesn’t have nearly the va-va-voom nor the creative insight to match up to Madame Yevonde’s. To have hung her work with that of the great woman might have been a mistake akin to Damien Hirst’s brainwave to show his first ever body of work with a brush alongside Gainsborough and Reynolds at the Wallace Collection. A bit of humility might not have gone amiss.


But never mind because the trip out to Ealing is more than worth its while for anyone with an interest in female archetypal psychology or powerful portrait photography. With images here of 1930s society ladies taking on the guise of mythological characters including Arial, Hecate, Flora, Venus and even Medusa, it might give you the chance to discover your own inner goddesses.



Role Play
PM Gallery and House
Mattock Lane, Ealing
until 3 July

I’ve just finished reading a delightful book from Persephone Books who publish forgotten classics by (mostly) women writers. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson was first published in 1938, then forgotten about for many years by all but a few, and then, on the back of its being re-published by Persephone Books in 2000, was made into a ‘major motion picture’ in 2008.

Seventy years after it was penned by a secretary from Newcastle, and six years after her death at the age of 96, Miss Pettigrew grossed $17 million at the box office. Maybe that’s not that much in movie terms these days, I don’t know, but what I do know is that if something I’d written grossed $17 million ever in a million years, I’d be thrilled over the moon. Although of course poor old Winifred was dead by then, so thrilled was probably out of the equation, but nonetheless, my point stands.

And my point is this: I’m always expecting in life that if I do the graft then the payoff will shortly follow. I think actually that’s what we’re taught to expect, but I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that in reality it’s a bit more complicated than that. I’m finally coming to understand that you must put in the graft and that you must then let go of it and, crucially, you must also let go of any expectation of a payoff from it. The payoff may well come, or it may not, but to plan for it is a mistake.

Particularly in producing anything creative, too fixed an idea of any particular end result is a fatal error. For where is the heart to enter if the head has already closed every door? And without the heart what have you created? Nothing more than an intellectual game; nothing of depth or integrity; nothing of meaning. In short then, nothing at all.

If you let the head rule the heart, if you imagine you can think your way through life, you may well dull some of the pain, but you will also numb the joy, and you will never, ever be truly creative. Because creativity comes through the heart, not the head.

But, as usual, I’ve allowed myself to waffle far from the point I had in mind. What I was wanting to say was that I wondered if Miss Pettigrew was perhaps the first ever piece of chick lit. Although I’m aware the term probably isn’t a great compliment and I’m not even entirely sure what it means, I do love Bridget Jones – I read it every time things go a bit stinky in life, and Miss Pettigrew seems like something of a go-girlfriend style precursor.

As well as its ahead of its time post-feminist over tones, Miss Pettigrew is also of that very time specific and very English genre of novel that’s one of my favourites - 1930’s Waugh-esque posh kids lounging about sipping cocktails, going to non-stop glamorous parties in diaphanous gowns, driving their cars far too recklessly just for a giggle, using phrases like “cheese it” and having elaborate conversations that go round and round in circles making no rational sense whatsoever, which is absolutely my favourite kind of conversation.

It must be said though that Miss Pettigrew does lack Waugh’s dark subtle underbelly, but she more than makes up for that absence by the fact that absent too is the Smurfette effect, i.e. that world common to literary fiction wherein the reader finds herself amongst a group of blokes with no more than one or two token women who constitute simply the love interest. Miss Pettigrew on the other hand is written from the girl’s perspective with the fellows taking up the romantic bit parts. Delicious.

What’s more I was over-joyed to find stated in serious literary print that has withstood the test of many decades of time passing, a truth that I have long known but never quite had the stomach to say aloud: that a girl’s most essential tool for successful navigation of the world at large is indubitably her face powder.


“Miss LaFosse and Miss Dubarry powdered their noses.
“Come along now Guinevere,’ said Miss LaFosse. ‘You must powder your nose again. It isn’t done not to. Last gesture before entering a room – powder your nose. It gives a sense of confidence.’
With trembling fingers, nervous, clumsy, contented, for the first time in her life Miss Pettigrew powdered her nose.
‘Do you know,’ she said happily, ‘I think you’re right. It does add a certain assurance to one’s demeanour. I feel it already.’
‘Attaboy,’ praised Miss Dubarry.”


Yes indeed girlies, it’s all about the heart. Without too much in the ‘thinking’ department I find one can manage perfectly well in life, but without the nose powder… one isn’t even off the starting blocks!