Write

Women's Art Register | Bulletin 67 | December 2020

Editorial: mapping our creative herstories

Download full spread as a PDF here

by Leia Alex & Caroline Phillips

‍

The Women’s Art Register is weathering ongoing changes with incredible resilience, working to keep our community connected and supported during these challenging times of global pandemic. Simultaneously we continue to orient ourselves towards the care and maintenance of our unique and valuable archive, and our efforts to amplify the voices of Australian women artists.

In our last issue we had paused our usual programs and offered the space to our community to showcase some of the profound and crucial art that has helped us process and reflect on our shared experiences of COVID-19 and its impact. In this issue we press onward, whilst honoring our legacy, to preview an exciting new project that adapts our programming and transitions our archive into the global digital space.

This Is W.A.R! is an online map that opens up and shares sites of women’s art practice in Melbourne, and we thank Creative Victoria’s Innovations in Marketing program for their support of this work. As a pilot project (we hope to expand nationally in future), This Is W.A.R! enhances the visibility of women’s art practice, connects artists to where they work (now and in the past), and activates physical sites of work, community, inspiration, learning, challenge and celebration.

Prior to the release of the map in early 2021, we take this opportunity to highlight some of the sites and stories. By quite literally putting women artists on the map, we reject the concept that women operate behind the scenes, unseen in their own homes and studios, out of the public sphere. Women’s art practice is situated and contextualised across physical sites, and decades, through these stories that connect communities, ideas, bodies, practices and legacies.

In this issue we present three articles and a visual essay that speak to the legacy and presence of the Women’s Art Register over the years.

Dianne Friend, the first Audio-visual Resources Librarian at Carringbush Regional Library, writes about the Library’s development and how it became home for the Women’s Art Register. This was a natural collaboration, as both organisations were interested in championing new types of resources and unrecognised creators.

Judith Brooks tells a story of challenge and commitment as one of the founders of The Women’s Gallery which, from 1988–1995, carved a space for women artists in the Melbourne art world. Including a notable collaboration with the Women’s Art Register, Brooks reflects on the many complexities of the gallery and the women that it supported.

Merren Ricketson discusses some of the artists related to Flesh after Fifty, changing images of older women in art, an exhibition opening at Abbotsford Convent in February 2021 that celebrates and promotes positive images of older women through art. She reminds us that these sites and practices of past decades are not just archived in the past as dead and buried, but carry through time via these groundbreaking artists with long-standing careers and art practices, and reverberate into the present through their dynamic exhibition and public art formats.

Throughout these works Caroline Phillips weaves a visual essay ‘Taking up space’ that explores a selection of creative interventions in Melbourne during the 1980s and 1990s. We delve into the Women’s Art Register archives and explore two prominent Indigenous public artworks: Painted Poles 2 by Maree Clarke and Sonya Hodge (1992) and Lie of the Land by Fiona Foley, with soundscape by Chris Knowles (1997). Both these works took up pride of place, and space, in Swanston Street in the 1990s—Painted Poles remains in place, but Foley’s work has since been relocated to the Melbourne Museum. A lesser known and more temporary intervention took place beneath the Dynon Road Bridge in 1998, following the international arts festival Construction in Process VI: The Bridge. Inspired by the Indigenous mark-making she had recorded by Arnhem Land Elder Andrew Margululu, artist Mars Drum worked with the community to make their mark on the pylons beneath this Melbourne landmark.

In 1988, our bicentennial year, over 1200 women took over the floor of the Royal Exhibition Buildings for a celebratory evening of women artists and activism. Led by Liz McAloon and her project committee, The Women’s Dinner was organised by the Women’s Art Register to coincide with the exhibition of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, at the adjoining Exhibition Buildings Annexe. Ten years later, Red Planet Posters’ Billboard Project (1998) definitively took up space on Melbourne’s streets, championing Carol Porter’s iconic poster Don’t Get Mad, Get Elected! around sites in Richmond, Glenhuntly and Footscray.

Finally, we hope you enjoy our Women’s Art Register rebrand, evident in this issue and throughout our communications. We thank our designer Sahra Martin for her brilliant and creative vision.