General Outline
Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH) is a project committed to the belief that recalling the past is essential to transforming the future. FAMH opens space for innovative and new forms of art, education and curation that respect the brilliance and labour of feminist artists, their allies and supporters, across generations. FAMH’s project documents the relationship between art and feminism across the UK and Ireland from the 1970s to the present day. The FAMH digital oral archive consists of the following themes: feminist collectivist, practices of care, anti-racist feminist art, motherhood and creative labour, arts activism, ecofeminist, and more. I will be working with the FAMH digital oral history archive, bringing together interviews with artists, curators, art historians, and art workers, along with their reflections on their engagements with feminism. In order to contribute to the key aims of highlighting, promoting, and publicly disseminating feminist art histories, to foreground the artists’ voices by publicising their incredible stories and experiences to a wider audience. This project nurtures thoughtful public communication, independent research and attentive and ethical listening rooted in feminist values of collaboration, care, and equitable knowledge-sharing.
My aim is to:
- improve accessibility and engagement of the arts through utilising the wonderful archive.
- highlight women's experiences and voice their stories through honouring their engagement with political campaigns and feminism and understanding the difficulties faced
- using the compiled interviews from the archive (include biographical takes from artists of a range of backgrounds and art practices) to produce a rich, nuanced, and diverse picture of feminism, art, and politics.
Focus and Process
Through identifying an area for further research (for instance a specific artist, place, group, exhibition, political movement or event), I will use the digital archive as well as other resources (available from travelling to physical archives across the UK and Ireland) to conduct detailed research that creates accessible materials that share the archive’s insights to the wider public and audience. These materials may include blog posts, zines, social media publications, short audio pieces and more. Furthermore, I will help the wider FAMH team with the launch of the Feminist Art Lives podcast by creating audiograms and promotional social-media content via platforms like Headliner and Canva.
Personal Motivation
As a fanatic for using creativity in storytelling, spreading equity in the arts and culture, and my determination to share and understand marginalised stories in society, I am motivated to explore these interests in this project. I’m interested in understanding the different perspectives and experiences through the art, acting as embodiments of society. This aligns with my interest in feminist theory and in understanding the female experience across different generations and within society (from 1970s onwards) through this school of thought. I'm dedicated to learning, understanding and adopting the various methods and mediums used as tools of storytelling amongst women to detail the sociological and political concerns and matters of the present world and so I'm deeply passionate about adopting FAMH's belief of 'recollecting the past to reshaping the future' in order to adapt and develop my understanding of what can allow for more minority voices to be heard. The oral history aspect of the archive is also intriguing to me, as a grassroots method of sharing histories, the archive centres and celebrates the artists' own voices and experiences. Moreover, due to the breadth of varied backgrounds of the artists, I'm interested to look at the intersectional feminist lens to understanding the diverse ranges of issues expressed and portrayed by the artists. I'm excited to engage with the different forms of art the interviewed female artists engage and work with (e.g. film, paintings, performance art) as I'm personally trying to learn how I can develop my own form of storytelling through documentaries, and so I'm curious and excited to to see how the public reacted to them and what I can learn from that.
Collaboration
I’m incredibly excited to work and collaborate alongside my fellow Laidlaw Scholar, Emma Rowland, the wider FAMH team, and Dr Elspeth Mitchell (Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, University of Leeds) to carry out independent research to launch the podcast, Feminist Art Lives. I'm eager to learn and develop the research, creative, media skills necessary to market and produce the wonderful stories from the podcast. My aim is to utilise my personal experience from journalism, work with student radio and hobby in graphic design to help empower and respect the archived art work by the feminist artists!