Entangled Symposium at Turner Contemporary

I skipped a class at uni to attend this on Thursday.  I went to the exhibition briefly before the talks, but was too rushed and stressed to enjoy it.  I did not get a lot from it.  This puzzled me a bit, but on reflection, I thought it was because the pieces did not seem to relate to each other.  Each piece may have had a narrative, but there was no narrative between them.  I looked at a lot of work from women I had not heard of, and was deeply disappointed that I did not get a Wow factor from them.  I was trying to see what inspired me from new contemporary artists (in line with my recent research, that says find what women are doing now, to inform the feminist concept).  The only 3 that I liked were from established artists - Eva Hesse, Mona Hatoum and Louise Bourgeoise.  Maybe this is why they are so well known. Their work is fantastic.

Courtesy of Katie Taylor

Courtesy of Katie Taylor

Then I was disappointed that I found the speakers all very esoteric.  I struggled to keep up with listening to complex sentences and making sense of them in my mind, let alone making any notes.

However I enjoyed Freddie Robins conversation piece, and although many of her knitted pieces are not to my taste, I had a lightbulb moment when she was talking about "Bad Mother".  Freddie said she had made it when she had post-natal depression, and her child had taken over her life and seemed to be coming out of her head.  It spoke of the experience of being woman.  A different experience to mine, expressing someone else's reality.

Courtesy of Freddie Robins

Freddie said her work was floppy, which made it easy to transport and store. (This is one of the reasons why I like my samplers - they roll up small and are easy to store).  She also was quite happy for her work to be staged by the curators of a show.  I feel the same - I am not very good at staging and if there is someone more competent than me, I am quite ok with them doing it!  Whereas Maxine Bristow was a complete control freak about staging (I don't get her work at all!).

I met Eliza Gluckman, who is the curator of feminist art at New Hall art collection, at Murray Edwards, Cambridge.  She remembered me from the Whitechapel Gallery Guerrilla Girls event, where I had thanked her for providing some of the funding.  Her comment about that event was that she had felt it was all about looking at the recent past ... with nothing about how to take feminism and women's art forward.  This had not occurred to me.  Eliza is a person to keep an eye on - she does some interesting stuff.

On the way home, I met Freddie at Stratford, while waiting for our respective trains.  I was able to say that I found her the best speaker, simply because what she said was accessible.

Freddie and Eliza made the day worthwhile.