A Room of One’s Own

A Room Of One’s Own 2024
Saturday 2nd March to Friday 5th April

This group exhibition brings together the diverse artworks of 75 women and non-binary artists who responded to an Open Call for submissions. The exhibited artworks were selected from over 400 submitted works, resulting in an outstanding collection of work by these 75 contemporary artists. The participating artists were also invited to submit an audio file, a voice recording in which they speak briefly about their selected artwork and their practice. These voice recordings are located at the foot of this page, and also with each artwork.

Most of the 75 artists are UK based, though works have also travelled from the US and Italy, and a number of artists who are now UK-based moved to the UK in childhood or as adults, or have lived elsewhere. The exhibiting artists' creative experience and length of practice range greatly from recent graduates to artists who have been creating for decades. Many if not most of the artists are accustomed to juggling different roles, and several artists have had previous careers sometimes in quite different fields.

The show includes abstract, representational, still life, and landscape works across a range of media: painting, drawing, mixed media, textiles, and sculpture.The majority of the works are hung on the wall, but we are delighted to show some smaller scale sculpture works in the exhibition too.

It was a conscious decision not to specify a theme for the open call for submissions from which these works were selected, anticipating that some common themes and concerns would emerge through the artists' statements and the short voice recordings which they have each submitted to accompany their work. I wanted to give a platform for the artists' work, words, and voices to shape the exhibition. Works on show explore themes such as:

• the mind as a room of one's own, the interior life, and the relationship between the interior and exterior realms;

• the mundane, the domestic and everyday; domestic space and home (refuge or prison?);

• our relationships to the environment we find ourselves in, especially the natural world: the experience and memory of being in a landscape, the curiosity and sense of awe and wonder that it sparks, as well as the cycles and rhythms of our human experience on a living planet; the seasons, and cycles of decay and renewal and metamorphoses;

• the fragility of our natural world; global climate and environmental issues;

• painting as liminal space in which to explore the ambiguity and tensions beween real and imagined spaces, hybrid worlds where reality and imagination coexist;

• colour: the interplay of colour and memory, the healing properties of colour, colour to convey emotion;

• connection, friendship, love, intimacy, and tenderness;

• experiences of loss, absence, separation, grief, and trauma;

• mental illness;

• lived experiences of neurodivergence;

• ideas around identity;

• personal and historical memory, the fragility of memory;

• sense of place and of home; feelings of dislocation, and the ambiguous nature of home and belonging;

• memory of childhood;

• artists in exile and their relationship with their 'motherland';

• the body as a vessel for the physical and mental self.

Shared themes will continue to emerge as the dialogue between artworks and artists continues throughout the show. I hope the exhibition will create a space for conversation and exchange of experience and ideas.