Category Archives: WOMEN IN ART

Leading American sculptor Anne Truitt is widely recognised as a singular figure in the Washington Colour School of the mid-20th century, whose monumental columns of colour are steeped with intense human emotion. She successfully weaved her family life into this artistic practice, exploring how the two could feed creatively and intuitively into one another. At…

For Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, fabric is both a way to tell a story and a metaphor for storytelling itself. In photography, video and digital works she uses fabric as a subject and a character. Take The Red Butterfly, which features a woman swathed in seemingly endless red fabric, wearing numerous skull caps, and in…

Motherhood is a recurring theme in the art of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, an intimate subject so close to her heart she would return to it over and over again. Mother to four children, she juggled raising them almost singlehandedly, while continuing to create some of the most important and enduring sculptures of the 20th…

Motherhood and creativity: it’s a tricky, loaded subject that has been the subject of much debate. Do the two roles blend into and complement one another, or are they opposing forces pulling women in different directions? As as a mother myself, I know what it feels like to juggle different identities, and yet how the…

In this series, I’ll look at art works featuring fabric by three very different women from Kazakhstan. I’d like to find out why Almagul Menlibayeva created epic videos and photographs of women swathed (or strangled?) by traditional fabrics in front of historical monuments. I’ll discover how Gulnur Mukazhanova reapplies felting techniques to create haunting face…

“I paint flesh because I’m human. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.” Jenny Saville’s voluptuous, rippling folds of flesh explore the living, breathing human experience. On one hand she is a painter’s painter, who relishes in the messy, smeary liquidity of oil paint, but she also draws parallels between the sensuality of painting and…

“I want the story to be told so that people understand what’s going on.” Above all else, Faith Ringgold is an avid, entrancing storyteller, weaving the darker side of African American history into her richly complex works of art. Though her practice spans a broad range of media, she is perhaps best known for her…

“In terms of making art, and writing, and anything that we do as artists where we have to step up to the plate, it should be uncomfortable, it should be nerve wracking, and there should be this level of the unknown.” Fearless is a word often used to describe Lorna Simpson: like an intrepid explorer…