Broughton, Kircudbright, NT Scotland. 27/8/17. E A Hornel’s home – Glasgow Boy. Amazing light on west coast of Scotland. Combined impasto impressionism with photo-realism faces. Child models paid 1 shilling, Mother chaperone 2 shillings. Sentimental pictures popular in Victorian/Edwardian times. 2 hours
Cragside, NT. 28/8/17 Fabulously wealthy William Armstrong, engineer/inventor. Munitions – rifling inside cannons made 57x more accurate. 102 rooms but homely feel. Victorian/1930s. Unmodernised as money ran out with nephew heir. 10 ton purple marble fireplace built for visit of Prince of Wales – display of money, power, status. 3 hours
Traces Exhibition, Snape Maltings 29/10/17. Supporting fellow female artist friends. Abstract acrylics, assemblages and prints. Watched Lori start to shake as she sold 3 paintings in quick succession! 3 hours
London Transport Museum. Poster Girls. 30/10/17. Chairman Pick was keen to have female poster artists in 1920s/30s. Paid much less than men, but commissioned for sports events poster, not restricted to floral subjects. Women often took male names. Included Laura Knight and Enid Marx 3 hours
Grayson Perry, First Site, Colchester The Life of Julie Cope. 18/11/17. Clever social commentary interweaving observations of evolution of life in Essex over last 60 years with social aspirations and expectations/reality of life. Wonderful woven tapestries 2 hours
View Seven, Menier Gallery. Southwark 6/12/17. Exhibition of textile work by women. Clever titles – ‘Blunt your sharpness’, ‘whole’ (mending piece).
Cardiff Castle, Wales. 10/12/17. Extravgant Gothic interior. Marquis of Bute only used for 4 weeks per year, when on mining/docks business. Devout Catholic, linguist, cultural supporter. Arts & Crafts and Arabic styles. Castle given to Welsh people when mines nationalised in 1948. 3 hours.
National Museum of Wales. 11/12/17. Terry Setch – Greenham Common women – inclement weather – strength, ingenuity, resilience, determination and power. Tudor portraits give insight into mines, docks, child mortality. Impressionist art bequeathed by Davies, mines heiress, spinster sisters – Red Cross nurses, ran WW1 convalescent home. 3 hours
Paddy Killer, South Shields. 28/12/17 Great exhibition by woman fascinated by family relationships and textiles. Beautiful drawings of lace, women and cats. 3 hours
May Morris, William Morris Gallery. 21/1/18. Amazing stitched pieces made by her. Supported her father’s business and followed his views on beauty, respecting skill and colour trends. 3 hours
Redditch Needle museum. 6/3/18 Needle making a key industry in this Victorian town. Incredibly harmful to health, largely women’s work. Very highly skilled processes to make all sorts of needles – sewing, embroidery, sailing, upholstery, hypodermic. Highly skilled product now taken for granted. 4 hours
Monet & Architecture NG, 27/4/18. Visual identification of landscape by scale of spires. Direction of travel and scale indicated how far away/how long it would take to arrive. Suggests identity, time and distance. 2 hours
Giants of Victorian Photography. NPG 11/5/18. Naff. Poorly explained. Everything referencing Lewis Carroll stressed the children in his shots were ‘mostly chaperoned’ but did not actually deal with his alleged paedophilia. Why the historical veneration of Lewis Carroll? 1 hour
Grayson Perry exhibition, Firstsite Colchester. 12/6/18 Great exhibition of Maldon tapestries and other works. Represents the Essex hinterlands very well, and narrates modern life stories, of people surrounded by the reality of their artefacts and environment. 3 hours
Stoneywell National Trust, 6/8/18. Arts & Crafts house with exquisite furniture. All have mortice and tenon joints showing, for integrity of making. Wooden chest carved end panels – fritillary; oak; strawberry; currant; laurel; honeysuckle; carnation. Knitted cotton coverlet – leaf pattern set on point. 3 hours
62 Group exhibition, MAC Birmingham. 10/8/18 – Caren Garfen’s hospital beds, all different sizes in minature, all sorts of heartwrenching comments on them about the experience and reality of suffering from anorexia. 2 hours
The Coffin Museum, Birmingham. 11/8/18. Newman Bros made coffin furniture and linings. Could provide coffin linings in Aston Villa colours. Joyce Green worked way up from clerk to owner, by share bonuses and inheritance from Director. Refused 1.2m from redevelopers, sold for £400,000 once it was Grade II listed/an industrial history museum. 2 hours
Edward Bawden, Dulwich Picture Gallery. 23/8/18. As wartime artist, paints all grades, notes names, grades and nationality. Combines lettering and imagery in early work. Wonderful blotter – pattern and doodles – normally valueless, beautiful detailing, yet preserved! 3 hours
Do I have to draw you a picture? Heong Gallery Cambridge. 1/9/18 Bob & Roberta Smith – letter to Gove – good sentiment but too much to read. Louise Bourgoise prints lovely – but gallery statements obtuse, did not add to viewing experience. 2 hours
Lyveden New Build, NT, Kent 10/9/18. Catholic Pattern and symbolism. Symbolism is clear to those who understand it. I’m not Catholic so I don’t. Is symbolism designed to exclude? Is this a good thing – to select the audience, or not? 2 hours
Ightham Mote, NT, Kent 14/9/18. Pattern and narrative. Sunflower pattern on carver chair. Indicator of power and status of person who sat in it? And fecundity from offsets on sunflower? Symbolic of powerful person in his absence, when he’s not sitting in it? 2 hours
Knole, NT, Kent 14/9/18. Women and Power theme. Loved Lubaina Himid’s imagery of the ‘blackamoor’ laundrymaid Grace Robinson on the downpipes that collected the water for her skilled labour – washing high status collars and cuffs. 2 hours
Stoneacre NT, Kent 15/9/18. Velvet curtains, printed with Angel and Trumpet. Other site of this hand printed fabric is V&A. Lyon sisters hand sewn samplers with multiplication table by Christianna Lyon fecit 1819. Fecit means s/he made it - stitch or arithmetic? 2 hours
Smallhythe, NT, Kent 15/9/18 Ellen Terry, Shakespearean actress. Costume style from Aesthetic movement – loose and comfortable, enabled free movement on stage, worn while pregnant. Beetle dress (Lady MacBeth) uses beetle wingcases to sparkle in the limelight. 2 hours
Bateman’s, NT Kent 16/9/18 Rudyard Kipling’s house. Associated with strong women all his life. Women & Power reinterprets wife from a controlling shrew, to a woman who defended Kipling from the demands of unannounced visitors and ran his household to enable him to concentrate on his work. Also reinterprets The Female of the Species. 3 hours
Monks House, NT, Kent 16/9/18. Virginia & Leonard Woolf’s house. Good explanation of her bi-polar disorder (paternal genetics). Manic when writing, depressed when published. Ran Hogarth Press. Covered books with hand watermarked papers even when ill. 2 hours
Petworth House, NT. Elizabeth Ilive. Female heiress, betrothed at 3, to protect inheritance. Multiply married. Invents cross bar lever to aid moving rocks, to till soil. Researches potatoes – her work, head gardener gets credit. Mrs Elizabeth Purser. Housekeeper. Identified by bunch of keys – responsibility. Hires, fires, supervises staff. Maids who handle fine china get paid more.Dowager Lady Egremont. Death duties of Lord Egremont led to Petworth being given to NT, and art to Govt in lieu of tax.Lady Lucy Percy. Lady of Bedchamber to Q Henrietta Maria. Plays on both sides of Royalist/ Parliamentarian divide.Lady Elizabeth Percy. Married 3 x by age 15. 4 hours
Raw Materials, Valance House. 20/9/18. Textile industries in East End, Russian Jews, unemployment, attempts at unionisation to improve conditions. Salvation Army Knitting Home provided accommodation & employment for destitute women. 2 hours
Virginia Woolf: An exhibition inspired by her writings. Fitzwilliam Museum. 28/11/19. 2 kinds of equality – one where women gain admittance to the world of men (vote, education, financial independence) or remodelling society to allow men and women to live on own terms. 2 hours
Women, Power, Protest. Birmingham Art Gallery. 12/12/19. Mary Kelly Post Partum. Not about competing with men. More about the reality of her life. Not sweet scented and sentimentalised. About her reality – complex, unsavoury. Humanist? 3 hours
Mount Stewart House, NT. Ulster 3/1/19. Women and Power. Included working class and gentry. Gave pro and anti-suffrage views of women. Anti-suffrage wanted status quo to continue. Pro-suffrage wanted women’s lives to improve. 3 hours
Fashion & Feminism, Ulster Museum. 4/1/19 Rational Dress Society campaigned against harmful dress fashions. Late Victorian – too much corsetry; 1920s promotion of soft, uncorsetted, bias cut, post-war New Look – rehashed corsetry, goes back to women as decorative – and passive because they can’t move! 2 hours
Making Her Mark: Women Printmakers from the Ulster Museum Collection. 4/1/19. Women artists known for their relationship to an artistic man, not their own work. Women used art to communicate wider public views that would be dismissed in wider (male) journalism (Lady Butler). Women have to join female groups in order to get their work shown and sold. 2 hours
Edward Byrne Jones, Tate Britain. 29/1/19 Stitching exquisite. May Morris. Really dislike his portrayal of women – languid, beautiful, sexualised powerful predators. Men victims of female power and desire. Yuk. 2 hours
Louise Bourgoise, Kettles Yard. 30/1/19. Don’t really get her work. Beautifully made bronze double breasts object. Textiles look unfinished. Poor gallery statements. 2 hours
The Beautiful Stitch, Embroiders Guild. 8/2/19. Embroidery as art; education; fashion; industry; status. Industry is both personal and commercial. Quaker sampler “speak well or speak not at all, that no-one may be the worse for what you say”. Religious repression of women! Education Act 1902 needlework and cookery compulsory for girls only. 2 hours
National Railway Museum, York. 10/2/19. Ambulance trains WW1. First Ambulance trains organised by rank, expects casualties in same proportion as ranks. Officers segregated from men by door (limits air circulation!) Later trains organised by lying down cases, sitting up cases and secure mental cases. Quakers ran 4 out of 12 trains. Woman nurse featured. 2 hours
