Additional Content | Jane Hughes Art

Florence - Uffizi Gallery

Portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga - Raphael

St Mary Magdalen and St Margeret with Maria Baroncelli and Daughter Margherita Portinari - Hugo van der Goes

Self portrait with red shawl - Elizabeth Chaplin

Afternoon in Fiesole - Baccio Maria Bacci

Venus of Urbino - Titian

Judith Slaying Holofernes - Artemisis Gentileschi

Venus of Urbino - Titian

With the Uffizi Gallery being one of the most famous in the world I was so excited to have the day there. However we were caught off guard by the delights of the Italian queuing system. There seemed no merit in ordering online as the prices seemed even higher and so we waited patiently for approx an hour to reach what we thought was the front of the queue, but it was just to buy the tickets queue, you had to do it all again in order to get into the gallery. However once inside you cannot help but be overwhelmed at the tour de force of unparalleled collections. The building, the fresco’s, the ceilings, everything is quite extraordinarily exquisite and of course from every window you spy the landmarks of Florence. Where there was a Carvaggio, a Botticelli or MIchelangelo then there were also hordes of human beings. It was impossible to get close and all my pictures included a sea of heads and a distant shot of a famous painting. There was though so many beautiful 20th century paintings and it was such a pleasure to see so many artists I had not had the opportunity to see before.

Turin - GAM

Nella Marchesini

Antonio Donghi

Felice Casorati

I had one afternoon in Turin, having arrived from Florence at lunchtime and knowing I had to catch the 6.00 am train to Paris the following day. In 40 degree heat I walked for about an hour and found GAM. I was the only visitor that day and it was slightly unnerving walking through these dark cool, windowless galleries entirely on my own. The collections are enormous and there were many artists I recognised from Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Marc Chagall. What I liked best however was seeing so many painters and art movements I had never encountered before. I wished I had had more time.

London 23 - RCA MA 23

Ken Nwadiogbu

Jesse Akele

There seems so much hype about the RCA summer show and I normally do think it warrants some of this attention, and maybe it was my mood this year but I really felt very flat about the work I saw. I had come to see three of my friends work showing this year, friends I had met at Chelsea last year, but none of them were painters. They did however talk about what a tumultuous year it had been for them with an almost doubling of students and there being a transition from the two year MA to a one year only course. I was drawn to Ken Nwadiogbu’s and Jesse Akele’s large exuberant canvases of abstracted figures and their use of colour.

Chelsea MA 23

Yuyue Zhou

Dirk Tsai

Qian Sun

I went back to Chelsea to see the work of Chelsea’s Graduate Diploma Alumni who had gone onto to do the MA, including Dirk and Quin. I really admire Quin’s paintings and have a few of them at home - we did swaps last year. Dirk uses various materials to paint on and is excitingly experimental with his exploration of surfaces. I had not seen Yuyue’s work before, but I liked the soft pink hues and palette which belie the dark contents such as the above picture of a beheaded baby like female being served on a platter with spider mothers adding to the sense of unease.

London 23 - City & Guild BA 23

Seraphina Mutscheller

Eddie Jones

Daniela Plou

Another trip to a graduation show, this time to see the work of one of my foundation year friends but of course also to see the work of the other students graduating in 23. Daniela Plou’s work appealed as her work starts from photographs of family, A habit I have been want to do! She paints quickly and dramatically to capture that sense of flux and time passed. Seraphina’s work is quite exquisite, so small and so intense. She works with pigment, seediac, traditional gesso on wood and Eddie Jones’s paints landscapes in layered similar tonal colours. They are very arresting.

London 23 - National Portrait Gallery

Fanny Trollope 1780-1863 - Auguste Hervieu. Advocate of civil rights

Chantal Joffe ('Self Portrait with Esme') 2008

It was such a delight to be able to go back to the National Portrait Gallery this summer. It felt much more accessible and less constrained than before. Tracy Emin’s 45 portraits of women now cover the front doors addressing the galleries historically poor representation of female artists. This is rebalancing is reflected inside too where in the 20th and 21st century galleries women now make up 48% of the rehung works. They can still do better.

London 23 - Turps Banana 23

Mary Mackenallen

Jeremy Scott

London 23 - Anselm Kiefer - Finnegans Wake

Finnegan’s Wake is a homage to James Joyce and to history’s cycles of rise and falls. It was an immersive exhibition of vast concrete and metal ruins, unstable structures, toys, books intermingled with twisted rusted metal. Born in 1945 into Germany at the end of the war his work reflects this own history . It is overpowering and I felt I could not do it justice in the time I had, I should have returned. It reminded me of Mike Nelson

Sommarlek 23 - Peckham Levels

Xingxin

Green - Zhen Yang

Ramah

London 23 - Isaac Julien 23

I find myself annoyingly wanting to write ‘tour de force’ to describe this exhibition too, but this exhilarating exhibition really warrants this description. Described as ‘sonic tapestries that are politically charged’ you are enveloped in this theatre of sound and image, each display discreetly separated allowing you to move from one screen area to the next, feeling slightly discombobulated and confused as to whether you will ever find your way out again. Isaac’s poetic work is politically potent and draws from a spectrum of artistic disciplines from film, dance, music, painting and theatre.

Galleries since leaving camberwell

Film

I love film and I could reference so many which have impacted me, but I chose these two because they chimed so powerfully with my research and my interests.

A Woman Under the Influence

John Cassavetes’s storytelling requires your close attention throughout this film. The basic narrative is straightforward. It is a hyper-realistic portrait of a woman who, for reasons we cannot fully understand, is disappearing into madness. But the film structure is a theatre of more than her disintegration, it is about the family and what is expected of women, her husband and the home that is supposed to root her to the earth. Nick her husband clings to the memories of his past happiness which blinds him to the present and like Lear, he rages into the storm. . The family demand Gena Rowlands to ‘just be yourself’, but that’s indefinable for what they mean is the opposite. They want her to be the self that works for them.

Cassavetes uses the home as a space to explore this battle between the private and the public sphere and where women sit in this space, with the staircase acting as a focal point in the domestic drama.

.Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman’s film ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was voted ‘the greatest film of all time’ by Sight and Sound in 2022. Three and half hours long, just as in ‘Woman under the Influence’ the film charts a woman’s disintegration over a period of three days. We observe her as she performs her role as housewife, mother and prostitute of three men, each who has their own allotted time. Each has a part of her, but what makes it so extraordinary is that this is visualised and made apparent through recording her day-to-day domestic duties; everything is obsessively orderly and composed.

As Laura Mulvey says, ‘Akerman transforms cinema itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression into a liberating force.’ (Mulvey, L 2022) Akerman takes domestic work, something unacknowledged and invisible and puts it centre stage. As you watch the film unfold, you become aware of small slippages, a loss of composure, a failure to quite perform her routines and to the occasional exposure of her emotions, which leads us to the explosive, shocking finale.

Literature - Audio and read

“Woman have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’ p35

Until a few weeks ago I had not read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ - and I find I am astonished by this and I am questioning why. It is a book to read again and again, a work of literary criticism and a feminist tome despite it only being 110 pages.

Essentially Woolf argues that every woman deserves and needs an income and a space of her own, but in making her argument she manages to weave into this storytelling and humour. She draws our attention to not just the social constraints women were experiencing in 1929, but also how they were materially deprived too. She demonstrates how this deprivation prevents women from gaining experience, from getting an education because they live in this England which she says ‘is under the rule of a patriarchy’ . It still is.

Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir of her experience of same-sex abuse. It is an attempt to try and construct a framework, to invent and build an archive when the language is missing. I look to explore this text further in my critical reflection.

Museums

The Foundling Museum

My feelings about the Foundling Museum are mixed. Of course, how could I not be emotionally affected by the stories of the foundlings and of the remarkable man, Thomas Coram. It is an insight into a transitional period in English history, into the social conditions of single mothers, attitudes to the poor and the discrepancies in wealth and privilege of the time. The tokens are emotionally charged and instantly relatable, they allow you a way into the feelings of those women who had to abandon their babies to fate. Time doesn’t alter that emotional bond. The museum is dynamic and renowned, showing well-known, recognised contemporary artists in special exhibitions. While I was there they were displaying work on motherhood and artists included Carol Walker and Chantel Joffe.

What I struggle with is the underbelly of their story. Historically I can understand that a 12-year-old’s life experience in Georgian England is not what I would expect or hope for a child of a similar age today and I feel comfortable in that understanding. I feel that much was done to protect children from what was seen as the danger of the streets, crime and prostitution. They were taught to be docile and obedient; they were found work. The trustees responded where they could when it was found that children were being abused after they left the home and they make clear that they would have prosecuted Thomas Day had they realised what his plans where. However, it is the documented later history of children who were still being sent there up until 1955 that you begin to read and hear about children's ill-treatment and experience of deprivation, shaming and humiliation that leave me feeling more than uncomfortable.

Continued :

It is hard for a charity which needs to receive donations, to maintain its incredible art collection and to continue its work with young people, to address their darker past. This takes me directly to Thomas Day. Yes, he was a man of great wealth and social standing from quite another period in history, but he abducted two children, and he is merely described as ‘problematic’, an eccentric. This doesn’t cut it; he groomed children, he displaced them, he took away their names, and their identities and he physically and emotionally hurt them. I cannot come to terms with this, it enrages me. It is the historical equivalent of ignoring Jimmy Saville or Jeffrey Einstein. The description of Thomas makes him sound almost charming and interesting. The eccentric figure often being used to describe the intellectual, the artist and those with wealth. I know this is a huge ongoing debate and it includes discussion about Gauguin, Picasso and Eric Gill to name but a few, but it needs to be addressed. I just wanted to snatch Sabrina Sidney, alias Manima Butler, and Alias Ann Kingston away from her place in history which is just as an adjunct to another, and shout you mattered and I see you.

Museums

Museum of the Home

Visiting the home galleries allowed me to explore further the concept of home as a physical space by looking at the lives and everyday experiences of those who had lived in the UK over the last 400 years, but also to the feelings around what ‘home’. means. Of particular interest to me was the investigation into the role of largely gendered labour in the private domain of the home. The victorian idea of a woman’s place still endures in the language of today.

Artists

joseph Yaeger - cropped paintings of hands, mouths and feet, but the main focus is on the eyes and seeing. Paintings are cinematic and he uses mediated image. “There has to be this reanimation of a necessarily dead thing,” Yaeger said.

Robin Megannity - cropped paintings, dark and unnerving. Figures. Lush

Elizabeth Saskia Langley - cropped paintings, denouncing traditional memories of childhood. Autobiographical in her own words ‘she extinguishes the candle on customarily happy memories

Michelle Vaughan presents forty notable conservative women. Displayed truncated at the neck like ‘a hunting trophy’. she has turned their toxic views into posters to accompany their pretty pastel pictures

Final Details Form

In my Video essay I will explore the stories of histories eclipsed wives. Documenting how using feminist historiography and storytelling within my practice can make these absent lives visible and awaken an understanding of alternative histories.

Research Festival Proposal Form

I plan to present the content of my proposed research as a podcast or video essay to be published in the online journal. Using my own family archive, I began my MA exploring, through painting, the marriage contract as principally a gendered political experience that defines the subterranean industry of domestic, wifely labour as unremarkable and as simply not there, thus rendering women invisible.

Subsequently, I have expanded my research to explore the wider context of the many forgotten wives of supposedly ‘great men’; from Sabrina Sidney the victim of a grotesque social experiment to create the ‘perfect wife’ and whose life became the blueprint for Shaw’s romanticised play ‘Pygmalion’ and the film ‘Pretty Woman, to the tragic lives of Catherine Dickens and Rose Beuret. Historically wives have been seen as. invisible marginal characters, absent from the archival material or have only been recorded under their husbands' histories.

By presenting this research, through my painting and through the written word I want to open up the conversation and to make visible these neglected wives. To acknowledge their intellectual and creative sacrifices, their domestic servitude without which so many of these ‘Great men’ might not have succeeded at all. I believe the historical undervaluing of female labour is equally relevant today in the debates about gender inequalities and women’s domestic burdens, as they are still unseen and undervalued.