Another random intersection.

I was scrolling through a news feed recently and came across an article about the impact of Brexit (such an ugly word – in more ways than one), on the British Library’s archive of Spare Rib.

I had completely forgotten that the archive was there having not visited it since the initial digitisation. I spent some time reading some of the features and (quickly) shared it with some of the students that I am working with.

I was running a seminar about discussing why we make the work that we make I used my currently in development motion project as a discussion point.

Several individuals in the session shared their reading that I was making work about representation and power structures. This had not been my intension, I was looking to move away from a narrative reading of the work but there were a number of reading that saw the evolution of the repetition as exploring breaking out of a box or becoming free, there were specific references to gender politics.

• Was this because the readers were themselves interested in this issue?
• Was it because identity is a topic that is frequently discussed in my classes?
• Was it because the figure in the image is recognisably female and the voice is male?
• Was it because in my previous work struggled with this question?

As I discussed during the Kino project, as much as I want to make work that explores the picture plane through abstraction there is a pull of gravity that pulls my work back towards a issues of voice, representation, and identity.

What we had in common often got lost in bitter political battles when ‘the personal’ became confused with ‘the political’. The question of what was a feminist issue and who should speak those issues was hotly debated at feminist meetings and on the pages of the magazine. Who was the ‘we’ of the Women’s Movement? Who was included and who was excluded? Who held power?

Roisin Boyd – Race, place and class: who’s speaking for who? –https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/articles/race-place-and-class-whos-speaking-for-who

What struct me reading the reflection on Spare Rib was the scale of the complexity of trying to unpick power structures. The Brexit movement is seem by some as a challenge to a structure of power, it is a person fight to nationalise decisions that impact local issues. The unintended consequence is that an arcane set of laws designed to project the economic interest of creators will deny researchers and other creators a valuable artefact.

This political and personal complexity is reminiscent of the visual complexity Pollock’s work. The sanctuary of abstraction is so inviting, but reality just creeps in.