Picturing the Difference

The notion of reclaiming an essential biological femininity is found in Vivienne Binns’s enamelled Repro vag dens, 1975-76 (the Gallery also owns a painting of the same name from 1967). This piece is historically important as it celebrates woman's genitalia in a manner not previously admitted in male-defined Western art practices.

Ann Newmarch presents a different tactic in Pax Americana, 1974. In this work the viewer is forced to confront the reality that the ways we look at and understand the world (including female sexuality) are determined by the media.

Gaynor Cardew's book Requiem for an epidermis, 1984, provides a witty and disarming look at woman's self-image, from infancy to old age, the work acquiring meaning and significance through the fabric and texture of the handmade paper the artist uses.

One of the most recent of the works in this exhibition that attempt to subvert established modes of representation is Julia Church's Superdor-een asks: ‘dear, do you lack confidence?’, 1982. The exuberance and self-conscious irony manifest in this work are themselves expressions of the self-confidence of second-generation feminism.

Issues of mothering are dealt with in Micky Allan's six Babies, 1976, from the larger series of that name. They represent not portraits but phantom images of potential beings overlaid with delicate touches of hand-colour — traditionally a woman's work in photographic studios.

The most thorough exploration of the mother-child relationship may be seen in Mary Kelly's Post-partum document, the thirty-six parts (Documentation V, 1977) shown here representing only one portion of this massive six-section work.

The entire work covers Mary Kelly's constitution as 'Mother’ and the reciprocal constitution of her son through the first five years of his growth and development. Using psychoanalytic theory and the memorabilia of infancy, the work charts the child's increasing independence from his mother and his entry into the patriarchal order, experienced by her as a loss and as a reenactment of her own negative entry into the symbolic order. The mother's refusal to accept this place leads to the fetishization of the child, which in turn is displaced onto the work of art itself, making of it a different kind of fetish object within a museum context.

Although the strategies used are varied, each work in this exhibition seeks to disrupt the patriarchal order through innovations in pictorial structure which displace commonly held assumptions about the nature of femininity and creativity. In this way the viewer is made aware of the problematic construction of sexual identity.

Kay Vernon