Week 2

Felicity Allen

Begin Again - Creating a dis-oeuvre

• 5 year project with 76 sitters, the text next to the images aren’t by the people depicted.
• Feminist art practice.
• Teaching and learning - interested in the crossover.

1970’s

Mary Kelly:

• Her experience as a mother with son entering nursery school - ‘Post partum document’.
• Quality of the event - intimate gathering (wasn’t normal at the time.
• Relates to the mother’s anxiety.
• Feminist work - mother’s labour.

Bridget Riley:

• The eye’s mind: Collected writings (1965 - 1999).
• Significance of teaching outside the classroom.
• Own curriculum.
• Neglect of art schools - independence was forced.
• Own experience was different.
• Mother’s voice & teaching.
• Disruption - 8 stated schools (learnt how to adapt and got good at only two subjects - art and English).

Ziauddin Sardar:

• Muslim in Britain - plural cultures.
• Always see things from different points of view.
• Created own feminist curriculum at art college due to the male bias.

Virginia Wolf:

• Utopian vision of college.
• The values her mother stood for.
• Cultural and political values.

• Year out from art school at a commune - learning workshops in the summer (various).
• Had to be of a certain class to go to university (70’s).
• Worked in education.
• Can I work in a gallery (for example) if I am not a practising artist?
• 1999 - stopped painting but carried on writing.
• Issues of power - she focuses on.
• Feminist practice - domestic labor and educational/ institutional.

http://www.felicityallen.co.uk/

http://felicityallen.co.uk/art/begin-again