Jane Hughes 

Exhibitions and proposa ls MA Fine Art Summer Show 3 - 8th July 23 b. Gallery - In situ and close up views a. Crit and Reflection c. My studio d. Planning and execution e. After thoughts and where next Crit and Reflections on For the MA Summer show, I submitted eight small oil paintings. Seven of them measured 24.5 x 24.5, and one was 12 x 4 cm. They were gesso panels with a depth of between 2 and 3 cm. I also hung a larger acrylic painting of 120 x 120. All of these works were in response to my research into the life of Sabrina Sidney, who aged 12, had been unlawfully taken by Thomas Day. There is a gallery of the paintings in situ and in close-up. descriptions of the process leading up to the exhibition and how it was received and marketed. There is a link to my ‘working in the studio’ page tracing the development of this work. The critique which followed the MA show was constructive and positive. Reference was made to how I had explored a shift in scale in this work and how that changed the relationship to the subject. This impacted the decision to put some distance between the smaller series and my larger ‘Lover’s Eye’ painting. I had initially contemplated them sitting together, as can be seen by how I displayed them along the floor before they were hung., but in the discussion, I could see they worked better apart. It was clear they were painted by the same hand, but it allowed them to each speak to their strength. Geraint asked me whether I had intentionally created a polyptych, and I realised that was what I had created. Each of the paintings constituted a part of Sabrina as a whole person, although there was no central panel as such. I spoke of how the painting explored ideas around agency, who is in control and making this child visible. I was concerned that in cropping her into fragments, I was still also denying her. But I also wanted to emphasise this was precisely how she was perceived; her value was as a marionette to be manipulated at will. I thought it was interesting that I had, without consciously realising it, brought the language of film to bear in my paintings: the sequence, close-ups and cropping, walking away from the shot. This is a concurrent theme in my work. In other feedback comments, the smaller paintings were described as intimate, encouraging you to draw close, while the larger painting insisted that you step away. It was observed that my source for this set of paintings was text, which was a significant departure for me – a move away from the photograph as my primary source. This opened the discussion on how to bridge that relationship between image and narrative and how sound could be introduced to alter how an image is viewed. This then led directly to the conversation about the QR code. I had inadvertently put the wrong QR code on the small labels which were to go beside my work – labels we all had been given. This was designed to take the user straight to the editing page of my website. I had confirmed with Anna in the days before that I needed to allow the ambiguity in my paintings to speak for themselves to trust in my work. I had written extensively about Sabrina in a blog which was on my platform, and so I satisfied myself that were people to access my website, they would find it – and now they couldn’t. My ill-considered solution was to put my large (nearly as large as my small paintings) business card up on the wall with a very large QR code. After a little teasing and ribbing, I agreed to take them down. I valued the feedback. I enjoyed hearing that the way the muted and desaturated colours I had used gave the feeling of something on the margins of not being quite there. I think the positioning of both sets of paintings worked well. The smaller ones felt harmonious with Lucrezia’s large paintings colour-wise but also in their content. I feel her women are often vulnerable and constrained within tight spaces, negotiating a place for themselves between the public and private. As such, they too, question who is in control. Alex’s painting on the other side also complimented the feeling at that end of the room. Huge paintings surrounded me, but I did not feel dwarfed. I felt the ‘Lover’s eye’ also fitted in with the other female artists at the further end of the room. It was between Xingxin and Breanne’s work, and although we look at women’s bodies in unique ways, we are all grappling with the female body as both subject and object in different ways. Jane and Kate Jane & Kate 00:00 / 25:11 Kate and I got together to reflect on the MA show and the upcoming Research festival Work leading up to show - link to ‘In my studio’ ADD Gallery images here and video MA planning and execution Ideas for small works on display The period between the 5th of June and the install on the 26th was intense and although I was not part of the curating team I was so pleased to be placed in D207. It was a beautiful, cavernous room with a great light and I believed the selection of painters in there worked well Several changes were made in D207 during the next few days as we set up. . Yu Li and Qiaolin moved to a different studio, and Breanna moved her two large tapestry paintings into the space - one to the right of my ‘Lover’s Eye’ and one opposite. The paintings were now better spaced as they had initially felt too crowded. Alex was asked to edit his selection and to move some to the Wilson Road Exhibition. I had originally brought in 11 paintings, but the consensus seemed to be that I needed to remove the more whimsical paintings. It was a good decision. I had gone with the idea that numbers mattered, and it was liberating to find it was okay to ditch the ones which had caused me such angst at home. I was still at the stage of thinking about the wedding bouquet I had created to incorporate the token and the idea of the perfect wife. I had left it far too late, and although I loved making them, it was clear when I brought them in that they were a distraction and even a mistake. Various scenarios for my paintings before any decisions were made. LOTS OF IMAGES OF SETTING UP HERE The Change of heart IMAGES OF WEDDING BOQUET here is original diagram of room and text sent to grain. also proposal Wilson Road I invigilated down at Wilson Road for a couple of sessions where “Labour Dispute’ and ‘Cutting Board’ (an edited version) got their second outing. This show was an MA cross-pathway group show curated by Dan Howard-Birt. It was an interesting experience to see which works he felt went well together. I think there was quite a bit of confusion for visitors. I had friends who only went to Wilson Road on the night of the Private View, and then could not find the main MA show. Likewise, I knew people who felt it was too much to come to the main Camberwell site and then trek down to Wilson Road. The evening was hot and sticky, and wonderfully crowded. Marketing & Promotion I LOTS OF IMAGES After thoughts and where to next Following the show, I was lucky enough to get a week away in Italy, but on my return, I found out we needed to evacuate our house. The front bay of our house was coming away due to subsidence, and instead of the long summer I had envisaged thinking about where I would go next in Unit 3, I was instead trying to find alternative accommodation which would work for my disabled husband, and pack up 21 years of our belongings, arrange removal vans, and then having to unpack everything at the other end. I had seven weeks and just got consumed by this move and a third bout of COVID.. I don’t think I was being inefficient with my time or deliberately ignoring what I needed to do; time just got away with me. With the last few weeks left of the MA, I wanted to continue making paintings that would build on my work for the MA show. I thought of other child brides and was concerned to read the statistics of children, even in the US, who as young as 10 are married every year. This led me to think about the notion of ‘wifedom’ as a state. I read Ann Oakley’s ‘Forgotten Wives’ and researched the wives of supposed ‘renowned men’. I had found my topic – I was outraged that so many ‘worthies’ had eclipsed their wives, anonymised their presence or erased them from their lives. I was now passionately committed to producing their portraits, for their gaze to hold us in their grip. Echoes 8-11th June 2023. 11 Avenue Studios, South Kensington Press Release for Echoes ECHOES Echoes presents the work of three London-based artists working with family archives to launch enquiries into memory, belonging and forgotten histories. Engaging with personal photographs and inherited objects, their painting practices explore how dialogues with the past locate the artist in a space of shared cultural memory. Painting items discovered in her family basement, Maggie Shafran projects a desire for familial connection onto the inanimate, inventing a world where the lines between inheritance and appropriation are blurred. StevieRay Latham’s haunted images explore the disjuncture between memory & and history by using painting as an interface where photography and oral histories can coalesce. Jane Hughes’ work evokes Freudian concepts of the uncanny as the artist excavates a collection of photographs and films which had been hidden from her family for many years. Biographies: Maggie Shafran is an American artist residing in London completing her MA in painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Maggie’s practice examines her collection of thrifted and inherited items through an embodied approach to painting. Maggie received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College and a Graduate Diploma from RCA. Her artwork resides in prestigious collections throughout the US and in the UK and is represented by Gail Severn Gallery. Jane Hughes is a London-based contemporary artist. She is currently enrolled on an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Art having graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 2022. In her painting, Jane utilises her family photographic archive to interrogate the power that exists within the family dynamic and the authorship of memory. She has exhibited widely in the UK and her work is located in various private collections. StevieRay Latham is a South London-based artist and musician, currently studying for an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. StevieRay’s paintings combine family photographs and folkloric imagery to explore ideas of memory and remembrance. Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University in 2014, he has performed and exhibited around the world and his works hang in private and public collections across the UK. At the beginning of May and after our exhibition in Old Kent Road, Stevie-Ray Maggie and I got together to discuss putting together another exhibition with the three of us. We were all working with enquiries into memory, belonging and forgotten objects. Maggie approached a contact she had who owned an incredible exhibition space in South Kensington to ask if they would be willing to let us use it. They were open to the idea, so as a first step, we went to an opening night of two artists using the space to see how it would work for us - it was great. The next steps were to identify a date for the show, design a poster, and write a paragraph about our work for a press release. Stevie-Ray was the expert at the posters and used one of Maggie’s paintings to great effect. There was no time for any of us to produce new work, so in consultation, we chose paintings, drawings and, in my case, a sculpture, which we felt complimented each other's work. I had my 11 drawings, which I had produced in Unit 1, ‘In the Long Run’. As they were charcoal on black paper, they were vulnerable to being erased, and so I investigated having them framed. I was naïve in my estimations of how much this would cost and the time the framer would need. With a limited budget, I chose instead to buy various mounting boards and a few frames to work out which looked best before settling on some mid-range black frames with 0ff- white mounting boards. I also produced an extra work to give a better sense of symmetry when they were hung. We began marketing through Instagram and word of mouth on the 30th of May. We took as much up as we could with us and dropped it off a the exhibition space on the fourth of June and began hanging the work over the next few days. We drew up a price list (which I found challenging) and printed it out for display when the show opened that night. The private view was well attended, and the feedback was positive – but none of us sold any work. We each took a turn to invigilate as we were only open for three days, but because the gallery was in a mews, tucked away from the main thoroughfare, there were very few visitors. We de-installed it on the Sunday. Overall, it was a very positive experience, and each time I get the opportunity to show my work in collaboration with other artists, I enjoy it more, I feel more relaxed about it and learn more about the process. Convergence 17-20th October 2023. A-B Galleries, Camberwell Art College On the 4th of October, Eleanor Street (MA Printing) approached me and asked me if I would be interested in putting some of my work in a group show she was organising with Carmen Van Huisstede (sculpture). The title of which was ‘Convergence’ and was due to open on the 19th of October at the A-B Gallery space in Camberwell. The artists were all women doing MA’s from across the different pathways. I was so pleased to be asked and to know that there was no pressure, we could reshow or repurpose older works. But as I had completed 7 of the portraits of forgotten wives, I was keen to show them. I shared the images with the group who felt they would work well in the exhibition. Eleanor and Carmen were just extraordinary in their organisation and in their curation. They were both keen to get the experience of managing an exhibition from start to finish and had already produced the press release. As the participating artists we just had to write a few lines about our work and deliver it to the A-B gallery on the 18th of October. Carmen and Eleanor then proceeded to paint the space, and together, they chose where to place the work. I could not have been more pleased with how they chose to display my paintings, and I liked the first names of each of the women being handwritten next to their portraits. The private view was small and intimate but very supportive and enjoyable. It was illuminating to exhibit with artists I had only known tentatively beforehand and talk to them about their work and their experience of studying at Camberwell, plus their plans going forward. I appreciated how quickly you can respond to a request and how efficiently and calmly a show can be brought about. Artists Showing Alexandra Diana Costea Emotion Etched: The Feel of Nature 2023 - Digital print on wallpaper and print-screen Alexandra is interested in creating artwork by combining photographs of natural scenery and printmaking to alleviate her anxious mind. She believes that nature has a therapeutic effect on the human brain. The artist uses natural landscapes to heal her mind and, in the process, to help others the same way it has helped her. Alexandra discovered the potential of healing through nature while dealing with her trauma and anxiety from when she was a sick child. Through drawing and printmaking, she wants to create compositions that can help people remember nature's potential for a stressed mind and body. At the same time, Alexandra hopes that her art immerses people in the same journey as her, the journey to heal and enjoy nature's beauty. Sofia Alrich Veytia Untitled 2023 - Hydro-coat etching on Hahnemühle paper 53 x 78c Sofia Alrich Veytia is a visual artist born in Mexico City, currently based in London. Her visual and theoretical research investigates the correspondence between spirituality, the natural realm, humanity, and the cosmos. She attempts to make substance of something that in its essence is transient, fleeting, or intangible, through amorphous figures that resemble the microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously. She is currently working mainly with intaglio printmaking, photography, and video as a means of thinking through an image in various steps, digitally manipulating the source material, dissecting it, and transforming it, wherein each mark diverges from the original source and intertwines with another. Jane Hughes No Man’s Land 2023 - 7 paintings, acrylic on gesso board - Virginia, Sylvia, Patricia, Mileva, Elsa, Catherine, Una Jane’s practice explores ‘authority’, secrets and the obscured within the home through the mediums of paintings, film and installation. ‘No Man's Land’ is her series of portraits of some of history's forgotten wives. Women who, though married to renowned figures in the world of art, politics and science, have been anonymised, abandoned or erased from history. Psychologically powerful, these small-scale paintings force us to meet these women's intense and unflinching gaze and not turn away. By telling their stories Jane hopes to begin to open up the discourse on power as measured through absence and silence and make way for alternative histories to be told. Eleanor Street untitled 2023 - photo-emulsion on porcelain 5x7 cm Eleanor uses images of landscape to explore memory and the grief arising from the loss of both parents. Her work considers ways of navigating and containing unruly emotions and of attempting to capture and preserve particular moments spent in the landscape, in the face of fallible, fragile memory. Eleanor uses the idea of transitional objects to create tiny things which evoke or encapsulate something much larger; and describe intimate, personal emotions that also have universal salience. These two pieces use photographs taken by her father in Scotland nearly 30 years ago. Joy Stokes & Eleanor Street Dialectics of the Skin 2023 Fluid Dynamic 2023 Although Joy and Eleanor’s work differs conceptually, visually and methodologically, they have found a connection that has meant their interests and something have evolved in parallel, over the course of the MA. Dialectics of the Skin considers the paradox of the skin’s fragility in the context of lymphodema – needing regular heavy moisturisation with thick, greasy creams to prevent cracking and tearing – with its function as barrier between the body and world. Fluid Dynamics references the importance of water to our physical selves, as well as to our emotional being. Song Yuhuan Red 2023 - etchings on Somerset Satin paper Yuhuan uses abstraction to explore landscape as a metaphor for the female body. In her work, she reflects on her own experience and emotional expression as a woman. The red flowers and the ink-like horizon attempt to express the symbols of life force as women understand it and the personal experience of women’s existence. Joy Stokes etchings on Somerset Satin paper Carmen Van Huistedde porcelain Te Palandjian Garden Bed 2023 - Ink on starched paper Te Palandjian sculpts using the mark-making movements of digging. Her work, being as much about process as it is about materiality, attempts to transform naturally-sourced and man-made mediums—casting with them, compressing them, or revealing features of them—to uncover the critical role that materiality plays in the context of archaeology, landscape art, and the politics of the garden. By re-processing her materials over and over, from the primary holes she digs, to the tertiary, texturized and compressed paper cast of a plaster cast of that hole, the audience is pressed to analyse her initial digging action. Palandjian asks, what does it mean to study a dug artifact, as an archaeologist does, when the artifact is the hole itself? And thus, what happens when the phenomenology of hole-digging and the maker of the hole are the focus of analysis and critique? Plop In August I was asked by Katherine Rose if I would like to exhibit with a group of women artists starting a second career in the arts. She had seen my work at the Bargehouse and at the MA show and wanted to know if I would be interested in being involved - which of course I was. They were a collective and had all exhibited together before. The proposal was written by Katherine Rose Chandler and included eight artists: Jess Blandford (painter), Bernadette Enright (sculpture), Francesca Guiliano (multi-disciplinary, Yasmin Noobakhsh (multi-disciplinary), Katherine Rose (film, performance and installation) , Maha Satish (painting) , Eleanor Street (printer). The Proposal submitted by Katherine on the 31st of August: Exhibition Concept: The Edge of Vastness I am proposing a collaborative exhibition celebrating women artists, who are over 40 years old and reclaiming (and re-evaluating) this golden age beyond traditional caring roles and first careers. Menopause defines this age for many women as a complete physical and emotional change. It was at this point when women were regularly committed to mental institutions during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to control and contain emotional outbreaks and non-conformity. Now there is a much greater understanding of the physical shift that happens, but we aren’t quite ready as a society to hear the potential wisdom and power of women seeing and feeling things differently. Suicide rates for women are still currently highest between 45 and 49 years (Ref: Samaritans) and many women still feel that their voices are silenced by lack of understanding and lack of support. As a collective, we believe that we need to challenge and alter the angle with which we view this chapter of life. We need to provide visible platforms for what is often ignored or unseen, to connect women and make space for exciting and powerful conversations and exchanges of ideas. We need to explore the lived relationships and experiences of this wise, fiery rage. My entry - with the intention of showing ‘Immaculate Conception’ Jane Hughes’ practice explores “authority”, illusions and secrets within the family home through painting, film, and installation. Focused on the role of women now, but also from previous generations whose choices were limited by their gender, she uses the photographic image as the springboard to illuminate and explore the family, motherhood and children’s lack of agency, and invites the audience to critically think about what we think we see Sadly on the 4th of September, we heard our submission had not been accepted. We will continue to try and find a new venue and as a group resubmit the application where there are open calls.

‘Immaculate Conception’ - Documenting Sabrina and the making of the perfect a. Sabrina's Story b. Work in Progress - Home Studio. I missed the 31st of May deadline to submit my proposal for the MA summer show due to ill health and I was quite lost at this point. I decided to go to both the Foundling Museum and the Museum of the Home because I had been circling the issue of children living without agency and the home, as both a place and feeling, in my previous Units. They were subjects I wanted to explore more, but I knew I needed to step away from my family photographs and the rich vein of my childhood as it was too painful. Having gone to the Foundling Museum on the 3rd of June, I began researching Sabrina Sidney’s life. Well, as much as I could, for she was largely missing - her presence was only visible in other people’s stories and archives. I went back through my diaries from when I was 12 to try and reconnect with that version of me and to connect with Sabrina. But to have been so indoctrinated as to believe your worth wholly depended on serving others. Sabrina was the victim of one man’s obscene experiment - she had essentially become a mere idea for him rather than a person, to be programmed for his pleasure. In the mix, I had to also try to understand her within the context of the period she lived and the expectations of gender roles in the period. There was no doubt Thomas acted illegally, but he felt entitled enough to take the risk and was able to coerce his friends to help him abduct the two girls. How could I imagine having a gun directly fired at you while being told not to make a sound, to be forced to submerge in cold water up to your chin when you cannot swim, to be made to lie in your wet clothes in a field until they were dry, to have pins and hot wax put on your skin and to be still asked not to make a sound - it is horrendous and unfathomable. I wanted to express through my paintings what Sabrina had been put through in these horrifying ordeals, but not in an obvious or explicit way. I wanted them to reveal themselves subtly. What she had suffered was kept private, a secret, and she could not protest. Protest meant banishment. I needed the paintings to reflect this experience. We moved into the Wilson Road studios, and I was given a great space in a room with Brianna, Astrid, Stevie-Ray and Maggie. Unfortunately, my family circumstances made it too difficult to spend extended periods away from home, so I was back to painting in the room at the top of our house, as I had done before. I hadn't decided what surface to paint on, but I got on a train to Jackson’s in Dalston and bought myself 12 small Gesso Boards. They were all small in scale, 25.4 x 25.4, with one measuring. I liked their solidness, and yet, at first, painting with my oils felt like painting with a felt pen on a shiny surface - I was scared it would just wipe off. I began to get the feel for it and the pleasure of it. I did not want texture; I wanted it to be smooth. The palette reflected a sense of the colours of the period, but I also wanted them to juxtapose with the harsh subject matter. I needed the audience to be drawn into the paintings, to be curious about why there were these cropped images of a young person, was this the same person, and what was the narrative - to become a voyeur. I used pictures I had taken whilst visiting Tate Britain, the National Gallery and the Museum of the Home as my primary source material to get a feel for costumes, furniture and the ideas of people living in England at this period. But I also created whole albums of pictures from the internet and occasionally used my family as models for hands, necks, etc. They were less helpful for this venture as their physiques were male and too old. I painted on the floor as I have done previously, finding it impossible to paint staring at the wall. I used no mediums to mix my oils, just Gamsol, to make them more transparent and fluid. As I seem to do, I used a lot of white. Some of the paintings were unsuccessful, and these were the ones which fixated me. Despite painting it repeatedly, Sabrina wading into the water just looked like some ‘chocolate box’ whimsy. I got too attached to the turquoise green of the water and so was trapped by it. The fireplace, too, just looked to me like a child’s picture of some naive Christmas scene, not the traumatic scene it was. To her great delight, Sabrina had been presented with a trunk of beautiful clothes, but then Thomas made her burn every one of the garments. Perhaps I tried too hard to try and capture all these terrible moments, and in the end, the eight that were shown worked far better together than had I put all eleven in. At this time, I was still very taken up with the idea of connecting the paintings with a token. The sort of token mothers left for their babies in the hope that they would be reunited one day, and I said as much in my email to Geraint on the 20th of June. Although I was beginning to think this might not work and thought I needed an alternative, as a backup. I already had a large canvas (120 x 120) and having always been fascinated by ‘Lover's Eyes’, I decided to create a scaled-up painting to juxtapose with my smaller collection. For this painting, I used acrylics, and I painted it over a two-day period, which is so unusual for me; to do it so quickly is unheard of. I loved it. I loved it was askew, and I loved the feeling that I didn't know if Sabrina was looking at us or if we were spying on her. The scale was large but not significant in the grand sense like Lucretia’s or Maggie’s, but it felt it had its presence, and where the smaller paintings focussed on body parts, none of the parts were as small as the eye, and this was the focus of the biggest painting. She would see us and we her. I couldn’t quite give up the idea of creating something beyond the painting and I thought the perfect wife would need a wedding bouquet. I created this by cutting up dolls and using the same areas of the body I had used in my paintings, but now sewn and bound into fabric as individual flowers in the bouquet I enjoyed making these - It was a relief from the hours of painting I had done over the previous three weeks, but it wasn’t successful and looked sadly craft like. I think if I had perhaps given myself more time it could have worked. c. Sabrina - making of a Perfect Wife Eyes Sabrina’s eyes were very important to me. I wanted her not to stare at us in abject terror, but to show she was fearful and perplexed. Rousseau’s views on female education was a significant influence on Thomas Day. He believed girls should be educated, but these should not be of an intellectual nature but practical lessons. She was to be trained to be a housewife and a mother, to please her husband, to enjoy only the simple things in life and to uphold a strict moral code. Mouth The mouth of women in classic 17th and 18th century paintings seemed to always be pouting, but with a childlike innocence. An ideal beauty was to have ‘prettily curled hair and two lips pouting of the coral hue’. Sabrina’s mouth is slightly open, her intentions open to interpretation. 17th and 18th Century portraits of young women cropped. Torso Static and under instruction, Sabrina stands slightly above us - her backdrop a cold statue of a male figurehead. She is little more than a child and her dress is burned due to the gunshots aimed directly at her. For this painting, I was influenced by paintings such as ‘Portrait of Helen Sears’ by Abbott Handerson Thayer and John Singer Sargent. Foot I feel this painting is a success. I felt I captured the movement of the weighty skirt, her body and the shadows on the ground. The sense of her walking away, and barefoot - I wanted the viewer to ask why. It has a cinematic quality to it. The colours are muted, plummy and rich. Hand Nick’s hand merged with the colour of the bedcover in the photograph I took. I used this to capture Sabrina's transience and ephemerality in my decision-making on how to paint her hand. I made it almost monochromatic. I didn’t want to show the pins piercing her skin, but rather to imply something, to create a level of uncertainty. She is holding the pin between her fingers. Fingers Thomas Day forced Sabrina to take regular cold baths and submerge herself in the lake in front of his house. I was interested in the bathroom of the period which was a copper or wooden cabinets placed in the centre of a room and then draped in linens and materials, before being filled. In my painting, there is just a trace of her fingers reaching for the sides. The colours are muted, watery and pale. Body The prostrate figure, the fallen woman are all classical painting tropes. Sabrina lies sprawled, exposed, vulnerable and defeated in an empty landscape. Her mother a ‘fallen’ woman, Sabrina would need to be meek and obedient or find herself abandoned and without support. The horizon is unpainted and I used only white, traces of pink and green to give the impression of her body almost hovering, ghostlike above the land. Back This is the back of her and what it means to be a figure observed, but unseen. Perhaps a less successful painting as the wax on Sabrina’s shoulder is crude and unsubtle. Lover’s eye Georgian society was fascinated with ‘seeing and being seen’, and as it was a period of limited social interaction between the sexes, the intimate gift of a ‘lover’s eye’ was precious. They are mesmerising and unsettling and resist categorisation. It resembles a peephole staring out at us. They were designed to be miniature, and the eye was meant only to be seen by the recipient. I chose to scale up the painting; it is no longer an intimate miniature but a demanding, unsettling, ambiguous picture of a young person’s eye gazing directly at us, holding us in her grip. d. A good few mistakes My whimsy collection. I spent disproportionate amounts of time on these paintings, particularly the woman in the water and the girl at the window. I think I realised the fire was a lost cause early on. I would agonise over the other two, repainting the head in the window, wiping it off - looking for other images of bonnets or women’s necks - they just looked stilted and emotionless. So many versions - all looking the same. 2. Documenting ‘ No Man’s Land' - the imperfect wife Virginia Sylvia Patricia Mileva Elsa Catherine Una Those imperfect wives The Applicant First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit—— Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it. Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it’s a poultice. You have an eye, it’s an image. My boy, it’s your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. 'Longed for him. Got him. Shit.' Margaret Attwood Having received constructive feedback in my critique after the MA show, I wanted to push forward and develop my thoughts about women and children obscured from history, making use of the methods I had begun experimenting with in my Immaculate Conception series – thinking about filmic shots, particularly the use of the cropped image, to continue to lose my reliance on image as source and to play with scale and tones in my painting. In my critical reflection, I have explored artists and ideas that use the interplay between the written word and image. This is an area I want to experiment with as I develop this series of paintings, alongside incorporating sound and film. During the summer, my family and I had to move, and for many weeks, I did not have anywhere to paint, let alone any paints to paint with, but once I was back in college and in a property, I could create a space for myself. I was concerned that all I had had time for was reading during the summer, so now I wanted to maximise my time painting and I felt I had about four weeks left before I would need to divert my attention to this platform and the Research Festival. As we were renting, my usual cavalier approach to the top room had to stop, and I now completely sealed off the carpet and walls with tarpaulin and plastic sheeting – straight out of American Psycho. After being so involved with Sabrina, I was impatient to investigate the imbroglio of child brides. For though Sabrina never married Thomas, his intentions were to mould her into his perfect bride, and so it felt like a good place to start my research. I began looking at the global statistics for child marriages. Up until 1929, 12 years old was still the legal standard for girls marrying in Britain, and today, with parental power being privileged, young women are still being coerced into marriages against their will in the UK. Right now, globally, 650 million girls are married off while they are still children, and in 9 States in the US, there is no minimum age for marriage, oh but only if you are female. Between 2000 and 2018, 300,000 girls, some as young as 10, were married in the US, in most cases to adult men. I could go on and on - it is just horrifying to read. (Lennon, R 2023, p 22-24) I had been reading about Virginia Poe, who was only 13 when she married Edgar Alan Poe. Still, this reading then led to further reading and I began to think more about marriage as an institution, and how it enshrines and defines the identity and inequalities of the sexes into law. This also chimed with the research I had carried out in Unit 2 – exploring the limited life choices of working-class wives in the post-war period, seen through the lens of my family history. After looking at Virginia’s life and her marriage I became aware there was no shortage of other male literary giants who had exploited, abused or ignored their wives - but then why stop here? I began to look at scientists, actors, artists, politicians, men who married…. As Carmela Cuiraru spells out in her book ‘Lives of the Wives: ‘The history of wives is one of resilience and forbearance, with countless women demonised, marginalised, misrepresented and silenced’ and ‘history is to fame as wife is to footnote, their archival information stored under their husband's collection’. (Cuiraru, C 2023, p6). I read Ann Oakley’s book ‘forgotten wives - How Women Get Written Out of History’ to get a sense of the peculiar state of being a wife and its impact on lives. She argued persuasively that ‘wifehood’ is a necessary way of understanding women's social representation in history, which is dominated by the stories of men’s achievements in public life. To become a wife was historically to become subsumed by the man, to have in effect no identity or rights of your own or as described in an English 1632 judicial text, ‘When a small brooke or little river incorporath with the Thames, the poor rivulet loseth her name…as it were clouded and overshadowed she hath lost her stream’ - wives just became a degraded specialisation of the sexes, made invisible and absent from the archival records. I wanted to take all the women I read about and revisit and reposition their place in history so their stories would become visible and would no longer be silent. To pay tribute to their achievements, honour their stoicism and sacrifices and celebrate who they were. It was and continues to be a work in progress. I wanted walls of women, a shrine almost. Work in Progress home studio It gives me pleasure to paint on Gesso boards and as my time was limited I chose to use them again. However for this series I was attracted to the smaller sizes the 15.25 cm squares. I only had a couple at home and so dashed out to try and buy up what I could. They were unavailable, so I had to do a quick online order. Again because of the time limitations for painting this body of work, (which had now become colossal, in the grandest sense, in my mind), I decided to opt for acrylics. I feel more confident with them as a paint medium, even though I prefer what I can achieve with oils. It was quite a different experience painting onto the gesso surface with the acrylics as the paint was almost instantly absorbed and dried astonishingly quickly. It encouraged me to work quickly and to use layers. I started off with the small painting of Virginia. Only one small historical painting exists of her and this was painted just hours after her death. I created her, thinking of her youth and the descriptions I read about her. She was said to have dark, almost black hair and eyes - she was only 24 when she died of consumption. It was this wasting away both metaphorically and physically that I wished to capture. She wears his heart as an earring. In my room at home, she is the one who disappears and gets lost on the shelf surrounded by the other wives, the colours I used are more muted, pale and translucent. I then painted Una and Catherine. I deviated from the small gesso boards as my order had gone astray and I just needed to paint. I feel these two were my least successful paintings. They both went through numerous guises. When Una met Radycliffe she adopted a conservatively gendered wife role within their relationship, wearing what was considered feminine attire. However, after Radycliffe died Una took to wearing her lover's clothes, tweeds, male jackets and hats. It is in this period that I painted her - the colours I used reflect this, more russet, oranges and browns. She always wore her monocle throughout their relationship. My interpretation of Catherine is from before she began producing endless babies. The attire, the colours I selected and her hair are a reflection of the period in which she lived. She is reading , and having time for herself. I felt that the smaller framed portraits had more impact than these larger paintings, but I am very attached to Una and Catherine nonetheless, particularly Catherine whose life and body was stolen from her, controlled by pregnancy and childbirth. I received my box of small gesso boards and so returned to painting at the smaller scale. Mileva and Elsa were very different personalities to each other, but both were wives of Albert Einstein. Mileva was a highly educated, pioneering physicist whose own ambitious were thwarted by a social and economic system which could not and would not recognise her. Married to Einstein she may or may not have contributed to some his greatest theories - there are too many papers working so hard to prove she didn’t -but she was his bedrock which allowed him the time, and she did what so many women do when faced with such limited choices, she became the domestic and the mother. I feel I did her justice, her strength and her intelligence gaze out at us. Elsa is more pitiful, she was used by Einstein as his administrator and organiser while he continued to have numerous relationships with other women, safe in the knowledge that she would remain dutiful and loyal. As she lay dying and in great pain he was not available to her. Elsa look is of a stoic. I have made her eyes less intense, and her complexion is more florid than Mileva’s. Patricia and Sylvia as choices are different to the other women in this collective in that each were and are recognised in their own right, and both of them were married to ‘famous men’. . This was not easy and came at a high price. Patricia was terrorised by Roald Dahl. He felt diminished by her success and so she was forbidden from flaunting it. She was also expected to perform the functions of a ‘wife’ as he saw it, ie look after their four children, cook and clean. As her career began to wane she was to discover he was in love with someone else and he abandoned their marriage. I painted her caught in the camera lights, part tearful, part terrified. I wanted Sylvia to be included in this collection because she was left with two small children on her own, abandoned, there is suggestions she was physically abused by Ted Hughes, and yet she continued, as long as she could, to write the most powerful, compelling and wonderful poetry until it all became intolerable. I would hazard a guess that it would be hard to find a man who could tend a home, look after small children and still create extraordinary literature. Virginia Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe was only 13 when she eloped and married Edgar Allen Poe in 1836. They were first cousins, and he was 27. Although it was not illegal to marry so young, it would have been disapproved of, and so Virginia lied about her age on the marriage certificate, saying she was 21. She had no education, and she was a child. After only six years of marriage, Virginia, at the age of 19, contracted consumption. She only survived a further 5 years. Mayne Reid, her friend, wrote of Virginia that ‘I well knew that the rose -tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of earth’. This was the signature flush of the consumptive, a disease romanticised in literature at this time with blushing and fainting heroines abounding the novels of the time. Much is made of Poe’s grief at the loss of his young wife, and so many sources are zealously keen to point out that their relationship was platonic, although this cannot be determined. Poe was not disinterested in the female as he was involved in sexual scandals during his short marriage, and on her deathbed, Virginia claimed that one of these ‘other women’ had murdered her. He was, however, fixated on beauty being conjoined with death, having experienced the death of all the significant women in his life and Peter Coviello’s in his piece on ‘Poe in Love’ argues that Poe makes the association between the adult women suffering and death in his work and therefore ‘loving a child was for him the only functional logic’. (Coviello, P 2003) Sylvia Sylvia Plath was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet and so why include her? - Because she had wanted equality in her marriage to Ted Hughes, but instead was left feeling suffocated by domesticity and a failure, because she had to even contemplate choosing between her writing and marriage, because of the evidence Ted Hughes was emotionally and potentially physically abusive in their marriage and because he abandoned her. ‘Make him happy: cook, play, read… Never accuse, or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force’ (Plath 1956) Patricia Patricia Neal was a successful actress married to Roald Dahl considered a ruthless, emotionally detached bully and a serial womaniser who nevertheless had the highest expectations on how his wife should meet his needs. Their mutual friend Charles Marsh advised Patricia early on in their marriage that because of her fame she was emasculating Roald and that she should ‘do all the cooking, wash the dishes and do everything in the house’ if she wanted to preserve her marriage. While Roald said of her that he had ‘thought it would be difficult to train her …you know in England a family is lost if a woman is allowed to take charge. While still in her 30’s she suffered a catastrophic series of strokes, this came soon after losing her eldest child to measles. Her career was shattered and her independence lost Roald now had complete control of her and he was determined from preventing her from becoming ‘an enormous pink cabbage’ - he was variously described by her friends as her dog trainer, drill sergeant or traffic policeman, but she did recover under his humiliating regime. By this stage he was a highly successful and a respected author, and he had also begun an affair with Felicity Crosland. This affair went on for 11 years before he finally left Patricia. Later Felicity was asked whether she had had any regrets in breaking up their marriage (he of course was innocent): ‘it was a particularly difficult situation because Pat had a stroke and was not well. I don’t know how he managed to bring up these children, run a house, do the school runs and write this major volume of work. he was so worn out, so needing to be looked after, which of course Pat could not do’…… (Ciuraru, 2023, p568) Patricia observed that success did not mellow Roald Dahl ‘ ‘quite the contrary, it only reinforced his conviction that although life was a two-way street, he has the right of way’ . Ciuraru, 2023, p564) Mileva Mileva was an outstanding scientist who had to fight hard to study physics and maths, subjects reserved for males. It was while studying that she met Einstein, and they became inseparable, collaborating on ideas and papers. They married in 1902, and Mileva, who had been thwarted in her attempt to graduate, now assumed the domestic tasks in the marriage while he, Einstein, worked six days a week. However, there is strong evidence that they were still collaborating in this period of their marriage, a time of his most significant discoveries. He is often quoted as saying: “I need my wife. She solves for me all my mathematical problems”. (Gagnon, P 2016) However, by 1912, Einstein was already having an affair with his cousin, and his marriage to Mileva was collapsing. In 1914 he sent her a letter with stipulations (above) on how they might continue - the demands were impossible . He then promised her that should he win the Nobel Prize, she could have half the money if she would grant him a divorce. He later tried to rescind on this promise and wrote to her: You made me laugh when you started threatening me with your recollections. Have you ever considered, even just for a second, that nobody would ever pay attention to your words if the man you talked about had not accomplished something important? When someone is completely insignificant, there is nothing else to say to this person but to remain modest and silent. This is what I advise you to do. (Gagnon, P 2016) Mileva had abandoned her own aspirations for Einstein and marriage, and he abandoned her. Despite being a pioneering female physicist, whose individual contributions are impossible to disentangle from Einstein’s, she has been denied recognition. In 2004, her unmarked grave, number 9,357, was finally identified – another woman who had been excluded from history. Apps. G Sagas of She (2021) Mileva Marić., Sagas of She. Available at: https://sagasofshe.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/mileva-maric/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CYou%20made%20me%20laugh%20when,had%20not%20accomplished%20something%20important. (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Gagnon, P. (2016a) The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s first wife, Scientific American Blog Network. Available at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/ (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Does Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric deserve credit for some of his work? (2018) The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/mileva-maric-albert-einsten-physics-science-history-women-a8396411.html (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Elsa Einstein spoke of his relationship with Elsa, his second wife, as a union of convenience. She fussed over him, organised his travel and his engagements, but throughout their marriage he openly discussed his numerous affairs with her and wrote to her simply stating ‘one should do what one enjoys, and won’t harm anyone else’. He clearly did not feel she would be harmed, but praised himself for his honesty. Walter Isaacson, the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe’ said that ‘when confronted with the emotional needs of others, Einstein tended to retreat into the objectivity of his science”. She is described as his protector and his carer, allowing him to focus on his theories. When she became terminally ill he was unavailable to her. TV, N. (no date) Genius Albert Einstein’s theory of infidelity, National Geographic TV Shows, Specials & Documentaries. Available at: https://www.natgeotv.com/za/special/genius-albert-einsteins-theory-of infidelity#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWhen%20confronted%20with%20the%20emotional,have%20had%20exacted%20a%20cost. (Accessed: 07 November 2023). Catherine Catherine was an accomplished author, a talented actress and a cook despite spending 22 years of her marriage producing 10 children and having at least 2 miscarriages. Charles Dickens had married Catherine before he was successful. She epitomised as a wife, everything that he had never had as a child and longed for - intelligent, stable, good-natured and able to produce children and make a fulfilling family life for him. But so many pregnancies, the years of breastfeeding and childcare took their toll on her energy and health. Dickens had already begun to seek out other women, but when he began a serious affair with Ellen Ternan he decided to separate from Catherine,. However of paramount importance, to this most controlling of men, was a desire to protect his reputation. During their separation he worked hard to imply the problem lay with Catherine. He first tried to get her incarcerated in an asylum, but this failed. So, he allowed and encouraged ugly rumours to circulate that Catherine was an alcoholic and an ‘incompetent mother’. He forced her mother and sister to sign a document, that he had prepared, to say they did not believe the rumours of his affair, even though they knew it to be true. She became marginalised and misremembered as a figure in Dickens’ life - the epitome of a frumpy and dreary wife. This novelist, so revered for his championing of the poor and the voiceless, was able to force his wife out of his home and deny her access to her children. In speaking of her, he said: “A page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank ...it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it.” (Forster, 2011 (p 136) But on his death, Catherine was able to renew her relationship with her children, had many friends, and enjoyed her life again. Lillian Nayder, in her book ‘The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth’ showed that Catherine, against all the odds did preserve a sense of her self and was not defeated. Nayder, L. (2011) The other Dickens: A life of Catherine Hogarth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Forster, J. (2011) The life of Charles Dickens [Preprint]. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139107877. Una In 1900 and at only the age 13 Una applied to the Royal College of Art. Remarkably she was accepted, but she would never fully realise and make use of her considerable talents. Instead she dedicated her life to her great love Radclyffe Hall. She had been married to Ernest Troubridge before she Radclyffe Hall (John) but she was stifled by the marriage. Hall was a powerful magnetic figure who considered herself to be a ‘congenital invert’ with a ‘masculine soul heaving in the female bosom’. She fully supported a patriarchal society in which women abstain from ambition of their own and be ‘a good wife’. Troubridge would be one of the best, taking the submissive role in their relationship. She wrote of her role that it was ‘ a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry’ (Ciuraru, 2023, p94) The final years of their marriage were marred by Hall’s infatuation with Euguenia Souline a Russian nurse. Despite this Una was never willing to leave Hall and stayed with her until her death in 1943. It was not until 1958 when Souline died could she finally severe that tie - she had begrudgingly continued to pay her an allowance to deter her from attempts at blackmail. She lived out her life writing a tribute to Hall, wearing her clothes and creating a shrine in her memory. Ciuraru, C. (2023) Lives of the wives. Harper Collins Publishers Inc Painting (and some film) In my feedback, Anna suggested that I write a small section on the material qualities of my painting. It’s a ridiculously hard aspect for me to decipher, let alone describe. In her book ‘In the Dream House’, Machado talks of writing under a formal constraint without the letter ‘e’. I am not for one minute trying to equate my understanding of the painting Lexicon with that of female-to-female domestic abuse, but the idea of it resonated strongly with me. A lot of my time at Camberwell and Chelsea before it, has left me feeling as if I have been promoted to Registrar, and yet I have only done the First Aid course. But here goes, I will give it a try Immaculate Conception The decisions I made in painting Immaculate Conception were dictated by the subject matter and the period in which Sabrina lived. I wanted to bring both the colour palette of the Regency period into the picture, but the range of the palette was deliberately restrained, subdued and soft to highlight how Sabrina was only ever almost there. The palette and tones contrasted with the subject matter because I was cognisant of the importance of not making her trauma obvious or explicit. I chose the Gesso Boards because I just liked them, I liked the feel of them, I liked their smoothness, and yet they were robust and good for building up layers due to their high absorbency. I used oil, but as usual, with some trepidation. They take a long time to dry on Gesso, and I attempted to do quite a few pictures over a relatively short period, but I know now from experience that I can achieve a much softer palette with oils. I used Gambon to thin the paint as I wasn't experienced using any other mediums and needed to feel I was in control of this series. How do I paint - I usually began with a faint charcoal drawing, but it was very loose. I didn't use base colour but painted directly onto the white board. My strokes are loose and gestural but also delicate and, at times, indistinct - with some of the marks being quite abstract. soft and paradoxical with the subject matter. I didn't want the trauma to be obvious or explicit but seductive to encourage the audiences curiousity. The composition is very simple for each board. There is only one focus for each of them: her eyes, mouth and other body parts. They are cropped shots of a figure, which allows the viewer to make their own assumptions. They are a series; I cannot imagine one being shown without the others. No Man’s Land and ‘Lover’s Eye.’ I have conjoined these two, perhaps a little unnecessarily. It was based on the fact they are both painted using acrylic, but of course, they are painted in quite different styles, in different palettes and on different surfaces. In ‘Lover’s Eye’, although I was scaling up the size of the painting and it was on canvas rather than board, I still tried to use colours which harmonised with the smaller series of paintings. This was also to reflect the period and my response to my research of the Georgian ‘Lover’s eye’ given as a secret token. I think subconsciously, the idea of the tokens given by the mothers who had to abandon their babies at the Foundling Hospital also influenced my choice of this larger painting. The colours and the tones I have used for ‘No Man’s Land’ are stronger and visually more there. They are unmistakably faces of women who have been squeezed into tiny spaces and are now looking directly at us and questioning us. In the portrait of Patricia in particular, I have used the technique of Chiaroscuro to capture the distress on her face. And on film I make film splicing both found and personal archives to tell stories about women, women going about their daily lives who have been ignored and eclipsed from our history. My films are political; calling history out by looking patriarchy squarely in the eye, but they celebrate women too. Sound is an important component to the films overall ambience as it alters how these images are received. I use the language of film in my paintings too. I set the Mise-en-Scene to make the invisible visible, I paint in sequences, use close up shots and use light to create the atmosphere I wish to achieve Etching Because Etching is so process-driven and because I am a person who leans towards chaos and a rejection of rules it makes huge demands on me, for Etching cannot be done without following those rules. I love the rhythm of it and trying to remember the steps. It is mindful because I have to pay attention. The mark-making is therapeutic, whilst the waiting to see what results look like can be decidedly un-therapeutic.. I realise I have been very unadventurous so far as I have been trying to see how I can translate my paintings into print, but I want to continue experimenting. This year, like the last I went to the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and I found I appreciated the work so much more having had a small taste of the skills involved .

In the Long Run (2023) A3 Charcoal and chalk on paper

About A contemporary interdisciplinary artist, Jane’s practice is research-led, narrative-driven and figurative, engaging in dialogue with the language of photography and film. Through a process of deconstructing and reimagining familial and found images through painting, drawing, the moving image, and installation, Jane places individuals who have been and are obscured, invisible, and absent from history back in the frame. Her work explores themes of authority, illusion, and the corruptibility of moments, posing questions about representation, the archive, and who holds authority over truth. She seeks out ways to tell alternative stories that rely on the traces of different historical data, spotlighting the histories we are told and directing our attention to consider where power resides and who holds agency. A London-based artist, Jane studied at Chelsea College of Arts and was awarded a scholarship for her master’s degree in fine art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts in 2023. She currently has a shared studio at the Elephant & Castle and is a member of the @Fold collective and @critical edge collective. Her work has been exhibited widely, and one of her paintings is currently on display at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. CV Exhibitions 2025 'The Couches', Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 'The Weight of Things'. Morley Gallery, March 2025 'Shelved'. Morley Gallery, March 2025 'Unseen'. Anteros Arts Foundation, March 2025 2024 ‘The Miniatures Challenge’, Canal Boat Contemporary, November 2024 ‘From The Ground-Up’, Lewisham Art House, October 2024 ‘Playground’, Swanfall Art, Handbag Factory, October 2024 'Un-visible', Safehouse 2, September 2024 'And you would have to believe it', Copeland Gallery, June 2024 'About Time', Handbag Factory, May 2024 Dulwich Open House, May 2024 'What We Bring to the Table', Safehouse 1, March 202 2023 Research Festival, APT Gallery, November 2023 To the Lighthouse Millbank - November 2023 Convergence, A-B Gallery, October 2023 MA Fine Art Summer Show, Camberwell Art College, July 2023 Echoes’ Avenues 11 studios, London. June 2023 ‘Carnival’, Safehouse 1, 139 Copeland Road, May 2023 ‘Spectrum’, Bargehouse, London, April 2023 ‘Lost memories’, with Stevie-Ray Latham and Mina Fouladi, 231 Old Kent Road, London. March 2023 ‘Forces of the Small’, Filet Gallery, London Feb 2023 2022 ‘As Witness’ Chelsea College of Art, June 2022 ‘I’m In It’, Safehouse 1&2, 139 Copeland Road, London, May 2022 ‘Bog [art]’, The Morgue, Chelsea College of Art, London April 2022 ‘Nexus’, Triangle Gallery, London January 2022 2021 ‘Solstice’, Group Show, Open Studio, Chelsea College of Art, London December 2021 ‘Resilience’ Art Foundation, End of Year show, Morley College, London 2021 Fine Art Interim Show, City Lit, London 2021 Fine Art City Lit’s Year 2, Online Final Show, City Lit, London 2021‘One Year On’, Morley in Lockdown, Morley College, London 2021 Other 2022 Co-organised Chelsea-wide Quilt Collaboration and workshop, at Chelsea College of Art 2021 film ‘Ghost Two’ was selected and screened City Lit Flicks 2021 festival Education MA Fine Art Painting, Camberwell (University of the Arts London) (2022-23) Graduate Diploma in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts London) 2021-22 (Distinction) UAL Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, Morley College, London (2019-20) Post Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck (2013-14) BSc (Hons) Economics, London school of Economics and Political 1982-85 Employment History Legacies Officer - (International Aid Charity) - July 2014 – August 2022 Communication and Information Officer -Civil Service Sep 2003- April 2013 Raising my family 1994 -2003 Editor- Hughes Publishing Company - Jan 1992 – Jan1994 Political Researcher - BBC Political Research Unit (PRU) - Jan 1987 – Jan1992

No Man's Land (2023) To become a wife was historically to become subsumed by the man, to have in effect no identity or rights of your own or as described in an English 1632 judicial text, ‘When a small brooke or little river incorporath with the Thames, the poor rivulet loseth her name…as it were clouded and overshadowed she hath lost her stream’ - wives just became a degraded specialisation of the sexes, made invisible and absent from the archival records. I wanted to take all the women I read about and revisit and reposition their place in history so their stories would become visible and would no longer be silent. To pay tribute to their achievements, honour their stoicism and sacrifices and celebrate who they were. It was and continues to be a work in progress. Mileva Mileva - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Sylvia Sylvia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Patricia Patricia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic (sold) Virginia Virginia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Elsa Elsa - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Catherine Catherine- Gesso Panel 30 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Una Una - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic (sold)

The Contract Acrylic 183 x 122 cms on canvas 2021

‘Immaculate Conception’ - Documenting Sabrina and the making of the perfect a. Sabrina's Story b. Work in Progress - Home Studio. I missed the 31st of May deadline to submit my proposal for the MA summer show due to ill health and I was quite lost at this point. I decided to go to both the Foundling Museum and the Museum of the Home because I had been circling the issue of children living without agency and the home, as both a place and feeling, in my previous Units. They were subjects I wanted to explore more, but I knew I needed to step away from my family photographs and the rich vein of my childhood as it was too painful. Having gone to the Foundling Museum on the 3rd of June, I began researching Sabrina Sidney’s life. Well, as much as I could, for she was largely missing - her presence was only visible in other people’s stories and archives. I went back through my diaries from when I was 12 to try and reconnect with that version of me and to connect with Sabrina. But to have been so indoctrinated as to believe your worth wholly depended on serving others. Sabrina was the victim of one man’s obscene experiment - she had essentially become a mere idea for him rather than a person, to be programmed for his pleasure. In the mix, I had to also try to understand her within the context of the period she lived and the expectations of gender roles in the period. There was no doubt Thomas acted illegally, but he felt entitled enough to take the risk and was able to coerce his friends to help him abduct the two girls. How could I imagine having a gun directly fired at you while being told not to make a sound, to be forced to submerge in cold water up to your chin when you cannot swim, to be made to lie in your wet clothes in a field until they were dry, to have pins and hot wax put on your skin and to be still asked not to make a sound - it is horrendous and unfathomable. I wanted to express through my paintings what Sabrina had been put through in these horrifying ordeals, but not in an obvious or explicit way. I wanted them to reveal themselves subtly. What she had suffered was kept private, a secret, and she could not protest. Protest meant banishment. I needed the paintings to reflect this experience. We moved into the Wilson Road studios, and I was given a great space in a room with Brianna, Astrid, Stevie-Ray and Maggie. Unfortunately, my family circumstances made it too difficult to spend extended periods away from home, so I was back to painting in the room at the top of our house, as I had done before. I hadn't decided what surface to paint on, but I got on a train to Jackson’s in Dalston and bought myself 12 small Gesso Boards. They were all small in scale, 25.4 x 25.4, with one measuring. I liked their solidness, and yet, at first, painting with my oils felt like painting with a felt pen on a shiny surface - I was scared it would just wipe off. I began to get the feel for it and the pleasure of it. I did not want texture; I wanted it to be smooth. The palette reflected a sense of the colours of the period, but I also wanted them to juxtapose with the harsh subject matter. I needed the audience to be drawn into the paintings, to be curious about why there were these cropped images of a young person, was this the same person, and what was the narrative - to become a voyeur. I used pictures I had taken whilst visiting Tate Britain, the National Gallery and the Museum of the Home as my primary source material to get a feel for costumes, furniture and the ideas of people living in England at this period. But I also created whole albums of pictures from the internet and occasionally used my family as models for hands, necks, etc. They were less helpful for this venture as their physiques were male and too old. I painted on the floor as I have done previously, finding it impossible to paint staring at the wall. I used no mediums to mix my oils, just Gamsol, to make them more transparent and fluid. As I seem to do, I used a lot of white. Some of the paintings were unsuccessful, and these were the ones which fixated me. Despite painting it repeatedly, Sabrina wading into the water just looked like some ‘chocolate box’ whimsy. I got too attached to the turquoise green of the water and so was trapped by it. The fireplace, too, just looked to me like a child’s picture of some naive Christmas scene, not the traumatic scene it was. To her great delight, Sabrina had been presented with a trunk of beautiful clothes, but then Thomas made her burn every one of the garments. Perhaps I tried too hard to try and capture all these terrible moments, and in the end, the eight that were shown worked far better together than had I put all eleven in. At this time, I was still very taken up with the idea of connecting the paintings with a token. The sort of token mothers left for their babies in the hope that they would be reunited one day, and I said as much in my email to Geraint on the 20th of June. Although I was beginning to think this might not work and thought I needed an alternative, as a backup. I already had a large canvas (120 x 120) and having always been fascinated by ‘Lover's Eyes’, I decided to create a scaled-up painting to juxtapose with my smaller collection. For this painting, I used acrylics, and I painted it over a two-day period, which is so unusual for me; to do it so quickly is unheard of. I loved it. I loved it was askew, and I loved the feeling that I didn't know if Sabrina was looking at us or if we were spying on her. The scale was large but not significant in the grand sense like Lucretia’s or Maggie’s, but it felt it had its presence, and where the smaller paintings focussed on body parts, none of the parts were as small as the eye, and this was the focus of the biggest painting. She would see us and we her. I couldn’t quite give up the idea of creating something beyond the painting and I thought the perfect wife would need a wedding bouquet. I created this by cutting up dolls and using the same areas of the body I had used in my paintings, but now sewn and bound into fabric as individual flowers in the bouquet I enjoyed making these - It was a relief from the hours of painting I had done over the previous three weeks, but it wasn’t successful and looked sadly craft like. I think if I had perhaps given myself more time it could have worked. c. Sabrina - making of a Perfect Wife Eyes Sabrina’s eyes were very important to me. I wanted her not to stare at us in abject terror, but to show she was fearful and perplexed. Rousseau’s views on female education was a significant influence on Thomas Day. He believed girls should be educated, but these should not be of an intellectual nature but practical lessons. She was to be trained to be a housewife and a mother, to please her husband, to enjoy only the simple things in life and to uphold a strict moral code. Mouth The mouth of women in classic 17th and 18th century paintings seemed to always be pouting, but with a childlike innocence. An ideal beauty was to have ‘prettily curled hair and two lips pouting of the coral hue’. Sabrina’s mouth is slightly open, her intentions open to interpretation. 17th and 18th Century portraits of young women cropped. Torso Static and under instruction, Sabrina stands slightly above us - her backdrop a cold statue of a male figurehead. She is little more than a child and her dress is burned due to the gunshots aimed directly at her. For this painting, I was influenced by paintings such as ‘Portrait of Helen Sears’ by Abbott Handerson Thayer and John Singer Sargent. Foot I feel this painting is a success. I felt I captured the movement of the weighty skirt, her body and the shadows on the ground. The sense of her walking away, and barefoot - I wanted the viewer to ask why. It has a cinematic quality to it. The colours are muted, plummy and rich. Hand Nick’s hand merged with the colour of the bedcover in the photograph I took. I used this to capture Sabrina's transience and ephemerality in my decision-making on how to paint her hand. I made it almost monochromatic. I didn’t want to show the pins piercing her skin, but rather to imply something, to create a level of uncertainty. She is holding the pin between her fingers. Fingers Thomas Day forced Sabrina to take regular cold baths and submerge herself in the lake in front of his house. I was interested in the bathroom of the period which was a copper or wooden cabinets placed in the centre of a room and then draped in linens and materials, before being filled. In my painting, there is just a trace of her fingers reaching for the sides. The colours are muted, watery and pale. Body The prostrate figure, the fallen woman are all classical painting tropes. Sabrina lies sprawled, exposed, vulnerable and defeated in an empty landscape. Her mother a ‘fallen’ woman, Sabrina would need to be meek and obedient or find herself abandoned and without support. The horizon is unpainted and I used only white, traces of pink and green to give the impression of her body almost hovering, ghostlike above the land. Back This is the back of her and what it means to be a figure observed, but unseen. Perhaps a less successful painting as the wax on Sabrina’s shoulder is crude and unsubtle. Lover’s eye Georgian society was fascinated with ‘seeing and being seen’, and as it was a period of limited social interaction between the sexes, the intimate gift of a ‘lover’s eye’ was precious. They are mesmerising and unsettling and resist categorisation. It resembles a peephole staring out at us. They were designed to be miniature, and the eye was meant only to be seen by the recipient. I chose to scale up the painting; it is no longer an intimate miniature but a demanding, unsettling, ambiguous picture of a young person’s eye gazing directly at us, holding us in her grip. d. A good few mistakes My whimsy collection. I spent disproportionate amounts of time on these paintings, particularly the woman in the water and the girl at the window. I think I realised the fire was a lost cause early on. I would agonise over the other two, repainting the head in the window, wiping it off - looking for other images of bonnets or women’s necks - they just looked stilted and emotionless. So many versions - all looking the same. 2. Documenting ‘ No Man’s Land' - the imperfect wife Virginia Sylvia Patricia Mileva Elsa Catherine Una Those imperfect wives The Applicant First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit—— Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it. Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it’s a poultice. You have an eye, it’s an image. My boy, it’s your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. 'Longed for him. Got him. Shit.' Margaret Attwood Having received constructive feedback in my critique after the MA show, I wanted to push forward and develop my thoughts about women and children obscured from history, making use of the methods I had begun experimenting with in my Immaculate Conception series – thinking about filmic shots, particularly the use of the cropped image, to continue to lose my reliance on image as source and to play with scale and tones in my painting. In my critical reflection, I have explored artists and ideas that use the interplay between the written word and image. This is an area I want to experiment with as I develop this series of paintings, alongside incorporating sound and film. During the summer, my family and I had to move, and for many weeks, I did not have anywhere to paint, let alone any paints to paint with, but once I was back in college and in a property, I could create a space for myself. I was concerned that all I had had time for was reading during the summer, so now I wanted to maximise my time painting and I felt I had about four weeks left before I would need to divert my attention to this platform and the Research Festival. As we were renting, my usual cavalier approach to the top room had to stop, and I now completely sealed off the carpet and walls with tarpaulin and plastic sheeting – straight out of American Psycho. After being so involved with Sabrina, I was impatient to investigate the imbroglio of child brides. For though Sabrina never married Thomas, his intentions were to mould her into his perfect bride, and so it felt like a good place to start my research. I began looking at the global statistics for child marriages. Up until 1929, 12 years old was still the legal standard for girls marrying in Britain, and today, with parental power being privileged, young women are still being coerced into marriages against their will in the UK. Right now, globally, 650 million girls are married off while they are still children, and in 9 States in the US, there is no minimum age for marriage, oh but only if you are female. Between 2000 and 2018, 300,000 girls, some as young as 10, were married in the US, in most cases to adult men. I could go on and on - it is just horrifying to read. (Lennon, R 2023, p 22-24) I had been reading about Virginia Poe, who was only 13 when she married Edgar Alan Poe. Still, this reading then led to further reading and I began to think more about marriage as an institution, and how it enshrines and defines the identity and inequalities of the sexes into law. This also chimed with the research I had carried out in Unit 2 – exploring the limited life choices of working-class wives in the post-war period, seen through the lens of my family history. After looking at Virginia’s life and her marriage I became aware there was no shortage of other male literary giants who had exploited, abused or ignored their wives - but then why stop here? I began to look at scientists, actors, artists, politicians, men who married…. As Carmela Cuiraru spells out in her book ‘Lives of the Wives: ‘The history of wives is one of resilience and forbearance, with countless women demonised, marginalised, misrepresented and silenced’ and ‘history is to fame as wife is to footnote, their archival information stored under their husband's collection’. (Cuiraru, C 2023, p6). I read Ann Oakley’s book ‘forgotten wives - How Women Get Written Out of History’ to get a sense of the peculiar state of being a wife and its impact on lives. She argued persuasively that ‘wifehood’ is a necessary way of understanding women's social representation in history, which is dominated by the stories of men’s achievements in public life. To become a wife was historically to become subsumed by the man, to have in effect no identity or rights of your own or as described in an English 1632 judicial text, ‘When a small brooke or little river incorporath with the Thames, the poor rivulet loseth her name…as it were clouded and overshadowed she hath lost her stream’ - wives just became a degraded specialisation of the sexes, made invisible and absent from the archival records. I wanted to take all the women I read about and revisit and reposition their place in history so their stories would become visible and would no longer be silent. To pay tribute to their achievements, honour their stoicism and sacrifices and celebrate who they were. It was and continues to be a work in progress. I wanted walls of women, a shrine almost. Work in Progress home studio It gives me pleasure to paint on Gesso boards and as my time was limited I chose to use them again. However for this series I was attracted to the smaller sizes the 15.25 cm squares. I only had a couple at home and so dashed out to try and buy up what I could. They were unavailable, so I had to do a quick online order. Again because of the time limitations for painting this body of work, (which had now become colossal, in the grandest sense, in my mind), I decided to opt for acrylics. I feel more confident with them as a paint medium, even though I prefer what I can achieve with oils. It was quite a different experience painting onto the gesso surface with the acrylics as the paint was almost instantly absorbed and dried astonishingly quickly. It encouraged me to work quickly and to use layers. I started off with the small painting of Virginia. Only one small historical painting exists of her and this was painted just hours after her death. I created her, thinking of her youth and the descriptions I read about her. She was said to have dark, almost black hair and eyes - she was only 24 when she died of consumption. It was this wasting away both metaphorically and physically that I wished to capture. She wears his heart as an earring. In my room at home, she is the one who disappears and gets lost on the shelf surrounded by the other wives, the colours I used are more muted, pale and translucent. I then painted Una and Catherine. I deviated from the small gesso boards as my order had gone astray and I just needed to paint. I feel these two were my least successful paintings. They both went through numerous guises. When Una met Radycliffe she adopted a conservatively gendered wife role within their relationship, wearing what was considered feminine attire. However, after Radycliffe died Una took to wearing her lover's clothes, tweeds, male jackets and hats. It is in this period that I painted her - the colours I used reflect this, more russet, oranges and browns. She always wore her monocle throughout their relationship. My interpretation of Catherine is from before she began producing endless babies. The attire, the colours I selected and her hair are a reflection of the period in which she lived. She is reading , and having time for herself. I felt that the smaller framed portraits had more impact than these larger paintings, but I am very attached to Una and Catherine nonetheless, particularly Catherine whose life and body was stolen from her, controlled by pregnancy and childbirth. I received my box of small gesso boards and so returned to painting at the smaller scale. Mileva and Elsa were very different personalities to each other, but both were wives of Albert Einstein. Mileva was a highly educated, pioneering physicist whose own ambitious were thwarted by a social and economic system which could not and would not recognise her. Married to Einstein she may or may not have contributed to some his greatest theories - there are too many papers working so hard to prove she didn’t -but she was his bedrock which allowed him the time, and she did what so many women do when faced with such limited choices, she became the domestic and the mother. I feel I did her justice, her strength and her intelligence gaze out at us. Elsa is more pitiful, she was used by Einstein as his administrator and organiser while he continued to have numerous relationships with other women, safe in the knowledge that she would remain dutiful and loyal. As she lay dying and in great pain he was not available to her. Elsa look is of a stoic. I have made her eyes less intense, and her complexion is more florid than Mileva’s. Patricia and Sylvia as choices are different to the other women in this collective in that each were and are recognised in their own right, and both of them were married to ‘famous men’. . This was not easy and came at a high price. Patricia was terrorised by Roald Dahl. He felt diminished by her success and so she was forbidden from flaunting it. She was also expected to perform the functions of a ‘wife’ as he saw it, ie look after their four children, cook and clean. As her career began to wane she was to discover he was in love with someone else and he abandoned their marriage. I painted her caught in the camera lights, part tearful, part terrified. I wanted Sylvia to be included in this collection because she was left with two small children on her own, abandoned, there is suggestions she was physically abused by Ted Hughes, and yet she continued, as long as she could, to write the most powerful, compelling and wonderful poetry until it all became intolerable. I would hazard a guess that it would be hard to find a man who could tend a home, look after small children and still create extraordinary literature. Virginia Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe was only 13 when she eloped and married Edgar Allen Poe in 1836. They were first cousins, and he was 27. Although it was not illegal to marry so young, it would have been disapproved of, and so Virginia lied about her age on the marriage certificate, saying she was 21. She had no education, and she was a child. After only six years of marriage, Virginia, at the age of 19, contracted consumption. She only survived a further 5 years. Mayne Reid, her friend, wrote of Virginia that ‘I well knew that the rose -tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of earth’. This was the signature flush of the consumptive, a disease romanticised in literature at this time with blushing and fainting heroines abounding the novels of the time. Much is made of Poe’s grief at the loss of his young wife, and so many sources are zealously keen to point out that their relationship was platonic, although this cannot be determined. Poe was not disinterested in the female as he was involved in sexual scandals during his short marriage, and on her deathbed, Virginia claimed that one of these ‘other women’ had murdered her. He was, however, fixated on beauty being conjoined with death, having experienced the death of all the significant women in his life and Peter Coviello’s in his piece on ‘Poe in Love’ argues that Poe makes the association between the adult women suffering and death in his work and therefore ‘loving a child was for him the only functional logic’. (Coviello, P 2003) Sylvia Sylvia Plath was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet and so why include her? - Because she had wanted equality in her marriage to Ted Hughes, but instead was left feeling suffocated by domesticity and a failure, because she had to even contemplate choosing between her writing and marriage, because of the evidence Ted Hughes was emotionally and potentially physically abusive in their marriage and because he abandoned her. ‘Make him happy: cook, play, read… Never accuse, or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force’ (Plath 1956) Patricia Patricia Neal was a successful actress married to Roald Dahl considered a ruthless, emotionally detached bully and a serial womaniser who nevertheless had the highest expectations on how his wife should meet his needs. Their mutual friend Charles Marsh advised Patricia early on in their marriage that because of her fame she was emasculating Roald and that she should ‘do all the cooking, wash the dishes and do everything in the house’ if she wanted to preserve her marriage. While Roald said of her that he had ‘thought it would be difficult to train her …you know in England a family is lost if a woman is allowed to take charge. While still in her 30’s she suffered a catastrophic series of strokes, this came soon after losing her eldest child to measles. Her career was shattered and her independence lost Roald now had complete control of her and he was determined from preventing her from becoming ‘an enormous pink cabbage’ - he was variously described by her friends as her dog trainer, drill sergeant or traffic policeman, but she did recover under his humiliating regime. By this stage he was a highly successful and a respected author, and he had also begun an affair with Felicity Crosland. This affair went on for 11 years before he finally left Patricia. Later Felicity was asked whether she had had any regrets in breaking up their marriage (he of course was innocent): ‘it was a particularly difficult situation because Pat had a stroke and was not well. I don’t know how he managed to bring up these children, run a house, do the school runs and write this major volume of work. he was so worn out, so needing to be looked after, which of course Pat could not do’…… (Ciuraru, 2023, p568) Patricia observed that success did not mellow Roald Dahl ‘ ‘quite the contrary, it only reinforced his conviction that although life was a two-way street, he has the right of way’ . Ciuraru, 2023, p564) Mileva Mileva was an outstanding scientist who had to fight hard to study physics and maths, subjects reserved for males. It was while studying that she met Einstein, and they became inseparable, collaborating on ideas and papers. They married in 1902, and Mileva, who had been thwarted in her attempt to graduate, now assumed the domestic tasks in the marriage while he, Einstein, worked six days a week. However, there is strong evidence that they were still collaborating in this period of their marriage, a time of his most significant discoveries. He is often quoted as saying: “I need my wife. She solves for me all my mathematical problems”. (Gagnon, P 2016) However, by 1912, Einstein was already having an affair with his cousin, and his marriage to Mileva was collapsing. In 1914 he sent her a letter with stipulations (above) on how they might continue - the demands were impossible . He then promised her that should he win the Nobel Prize, she could have half the money if she would grant him a divorce. He later tried to rescind on this promise and wrote to her: You made me laugh when you started threatening me with your recollections. Have you ever considered, even just for a second, that nobody would ever pay attention to your words if the man you talked about had not accomplished something important? When someone is completely insignificant, there is nothing else to say to this person but to remain modest and silent. This is what I advise you to do. (Gagnon, P 2016) Mileva had abandoned her own aspirations for Einstein and marriage, and he abandoned her. Despite being a pioneering female physicist, whose individual contributions are impossible to disentangle from Einstein’s, she has been denied recognition. In 2004, her unmarked grave, number 9,357, was finally identified – another woman who had been excluded from history. Apps. G Sagas of She (2021) Mileva Marić., Sagas of She. Available at: https://sagasofshe.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/mileva-maric/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CYou%20made%20me%20laugh%20when,had%20not%20accomplished%20something%20important. (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Gagnon, P. (2016a) The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s first wife, Scientific American Blog Network. Available at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/ (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Does Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric deserve credit for some of his work? (2018) The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/mileva-maric-albert-einsten-physics-science-history-women-a8396411.html (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Elsa Einstein spoke of his relationship with Elsa, his second wife, as a union of convenience. She fussed over him, organised his travel and his engagements, but throughout their marriage he openly discussed his numerous affairs with her and wrote to her simply stating ‘one should do what one enjoys, and won’t harm anyone else’. He clearly did not feel she would be harmed, but praised himself for his honesty. Walter Isaacson, the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe’ said that ‘when confronted with the emotional needs of others, Einstein tended to retreat into the objectivity of his science”. She is described as his protector and his carer, allowing him to focus on his theories. When she became terminally ill he was unavailable to her. TV, N. (no date) Genius Albert Einstein’s theory of infidelity, National Geographic TV Shows, Specials & Documentaries. Available at: https://www.natgeotv.com/za/special/genius-albert-einsteins-theory-of infidelity#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWhen%20confronted%20with%20the%20emotional,have%20had%20exacted%20a%20cost. (Accessed: 07 November 2023). Catherine Catherine was an accomplished author, a talented actress and a cook despite spending 22 years of her marriage producing 10 children and having at least 2 miscarriages. Charles Dickens had married Catherine before he was successful. She epitomised as a wife, everything that he had never had as a child and longed for - intelligent, stable, good-natured and able to produce children and make a fulfilling family life for him. But so many pregnancies, the years of breastfeeding and childcare took their toll on her energy and health. Dickens had already begun to seek out other women, but when he began a serious affair with Ellen Ternan he decided to separate from Catherine,. However of paramount importance, to this most controlling of men, was a desire to protect his reputation. During their separation he worked hard to imply the problem lay with Catherine. He first tried to get her incarcerated in an asylum, but this failed. So, he allowed and encouraged ugly rumours to circulate that Catherine was an alcoholic and an ‘incompetent mother’. He forced her mother and sister to sign a document, that he had prepared, to say they did not believe the rumours of his affair, even though they knew it to be true. She became marginalised and misremembered as a figure in Dickens’ life - the epitome of a frumpy and dreary wife. This novelist, so revered for his championing of the poor and the voiceless, was able to force his wife out of his home and deny her access to her children. In speaking of her, he said: “A page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank ...it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it.” (Forster, 2011 (p 136) But on his death, Catherine was able to renew her relationship with her children, had many friends, and enjoyed her life again. Lillian Nayder, in her book ‘The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth’ showed that Catherine, against all the odds did preserve a sense of her self and was not defeated. Nayder, L. (2011) The other Dickens: A life of Catherine Hogarth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Forster, J. (2011) The life of Charles Dickens [Preprint]. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139107877. Una In 1900 and at only the age 13 Una applied to the Royal College of Art. Remarkably she was accepted, but she would never fully realise and make use of her considerable talents. Instead she dedicated her life to her great love Radclyffe Hall. She had been married to Ernest Troubridge before she Radclyffe Hall (John) but she was stifled by the marriage. Hall was a powerful magnetic figure who considered herself to be a ‘congenital invert’ with a ‘masculine soul heaving in the female bosom’. She fully supported a patriarchal society in which women abstain from ambition of their own and be ‘a good wife’. Troubridge would be one of the best, taking the submissive role in their relationship. She wrote of her role that it was ‘ a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry’ (Ciuraru, 2023, p94) The final years of their marriage were marred by Hall’s infatuation with Euguenia Souline a Russian nurse. Despite this Una was never willing to leave Hall and stayed with her until her death in 1943. It was not until 1958 when Souline died could she finally severe that tie - she had begrudgingly continued to pay her an allowance to deter her from attempts at blackmail. She lived out her life writing a tribute to Hall, wearing her clothes and creating a shrine in her memory. Ciuraru, C. (2023) Lives of the wives. Harper Collins Publishers Inc Painting (and some film) In my feedback, Anna suggested that I write a small section on the material qualities of my painting. It’s a ridiculously hard aspect for me to decipher, let alone describe. In her book ‘In the Dream House’, Machado talks of writing under a formal constraint without the letter ‘e’. I am not for one minute trying to equate my understanding of the painting Lexicon with that of female-to-female domestic abuse, but the idea of it resonated strongly with me. A lot of my time at Camberwell and Chelsea before it, has left me feeling as if I have been promoted to Registrar, and yet I have only done the First Aid course. But here goes, I will give it a try Immaculate Conception The decisions I made in painting Immaculate Conception were dictated by the subject matter and the period in which Sabrina lived. I wanted to bring both the colour palette of the Regency period into the picture, but the range of the palette was deliberately restrained, subdued and soft to highlight how Sabrina was only ever almost there. The palette and tones contrasted with the subject matter because I was cognisant of the importance of not making her trauma obvious or explicit. I chose the Gesso Boards because I just liked them, I liked the feel of them, I liked their smoothness, and yet they were robust and good for building up layers due to their high absorbency. I used oil, but as usual, with some trepidation. They take a long time to dry on Gesso, and I attempted to do quite a few pictures over a relatively short period, but I know now from experience that I can achieve a much softer palette with oils. I used Gambon to thin the paint as I wasn't experienced using any other mediums and needed to feel I was in control of this series. How do I paint - I usually began with a faint charcoal drawing, but it was very loose. I didn't use base colour but painted directly onto the white board. My strokes are loose and gestural but also delicate and, at times, indistinct - with some of the marks being quite abstract. soft and paradoxical with the subject matter. I didn't want the trauma to be obvious or explicit but seductive to encourage the audiences curiousity. The composition is very simple for each board. There is only one focus for each of them: her eyes, mouth and other body parts. They are cropped shots of a figure, which allows the viewer to make their own assumptions. They are a series; I cannot imagine one being shown without the others. No Man’s Land and ‘Lover’s Eye.’ I have conjoined these two, perhaps a little unnecessarily. It was based on the fact they are both painted using acrylic, but of course, they are painted in quite different styles, in different palettes and on different surfaces. In ‘Lover’s Eye’, although I was scaling up the size of the painting and it was on canvas rather than board, I still tried to use colours which harmonised with the smaller series of paintings. This was also to reflect the period and my response to my research of the Georgian ‘Lover’s eye’ given as a secret token. I think subconsciously, the idea of the tokens given by the mothers who had to abandon their babies at the Foundling Hospital also influenced my choice of this larger painting. The colours and the tones I have used for ‘No Man’s Land’ are stronger and visually more there. They are unmistakably faces of women who have been squeezed into tiny spaces and are now looking directly at us and questioning us. In the portrait of Patricia in particular, I have used the technique of Chiaroscuro to capture the distress on her face. And on film I make film splicing both found and personal archives to tell stories about women, women going about their daily lives who have been ignored and eclipsed from our history. My films are political; calling history out by looking patriarchy squarely in the eye, but they celebrate women too. Sound is an important component to the films overall ambience as it alters how these images are received. I use the language of film in my paintings too. I set the Mise-en-Scene to make the invisible visible, I paint in sequences, use close up shots and use light to create the atmosphere I wish to achieve Etching Because Etching is so process-driven and because I am a person who leans towards chaos and a rejection of rules it makes huge demands on me, for Etching cannot be done without following those rules. I love the rhythm of it and trying to remember the steps. It is mindful because I have to pay attention. The mark-making is therapeutic, whilst the waiting to see what results look like can be decidedly un-therapeutic.. I realise I have been very unadventurous so far as I have been trying to see how I can translate my paintings into print, but I want to continue experimenting. This year, like the last I went to the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and I found I appreciated the work so much more having had a small taste of the skills involved .

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Gallery: Resolved Work Immaculate Conception - the Perfect Wife Eyes - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Mouth - Gesso Panel 30 x 10 cm ( 2 cm deep) Oils Torso - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Foot - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Hand - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Finger - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Back - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Body - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Lover’s Eye - Canvas 120 x 120 cm Acrylic 2. Gallery ‘No Man’s Land’ - Imperfect wives Virginia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Sylvia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Patricia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Mileva- Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Elsa - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Catherine - Gesso Panel 30 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic © 2035 by Agatha Kronberg. Powered and secured by Wix Una- Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic

Girls II 90 x 60 cm Acrylic on Canvas 2023

Unfinished Still 20 x 20 cms Acrylic on canvas (2023)