Yet the domestic – in scale, in colour, in clutter, and site – has also been an important subject for generations and its reinsertion into the minimalist white cube gallery is a feminist art legacy that has required continual maintenance. Since her 1968 film and early paintings, Loene Furler has reinserted the home with its endless labours – a bind for women, which begins from birth – into the long lineage of patriarchal painting as an important subject. Noticing that ‘women had been relegated to helpers/handmaidens to the male artist’,17 Furler’s ceramic and paint-based bodies of work, as well as her music, have exorcised these frustrations. Fragmented personal symbols, reflected eyes, outstretched hands and knotted rope have expressed these vexations, especially at a ‘scattered mind’,18 which is the aftereffect of juggling the diverse roles necessary for negotiating the precarious combination of being both woman and artist.
From There to Here recognises five women, who faced with inequality, have been activists, role models, and have survived as artists against the gendered odds. Their legacies mean that these odds are improving for Australian women artists today … yet these still taper off in critical areas. Statistically, Elvis Richardson’s The CoUNTess Report19 of 2014 found that women are underrepresented in the arts in Australia in two main areas: exhibiting in commercial and state galleries, and representation in art media. When looking back across generations of feminist art, it is striking how records of exhibitions – in newspapers, catalogues, art journals – are now so critical to remembering, or forgetting. Sadly but not surprisingly, exhibitions such as The Women’s Show have left little behind. Certainly, contemporary artists such as Barbara Cleveland (formally Brown Council), or projects such as the Future Feminist Archive, have confirmed these archives are in need of reinvigorating.
Above: Margaret Dodd, Hoon Holden (1977), ceramic sculpture, 18.5 x 42 x 18.5 cm. Image courtesy the artist. Photograph: Clay Glen.
Re-membering histories and legacies by revisiting and revitalising feminist art from decades ago is critical for contemporary feminism. Part of living a feminist life, Ahmed has written, means negotiating ‘how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls.’21 Re-membered feminist histories reveal these historical walls, like all histories, to be constructions and vulnerable to dismantlement – their solidity an illusion. Yet if The Handmaid’s Tale television series,22 with its timely release at the height of unstable international and highly-gendered politics, has taught us anything, it is that new walls can be made ever so fast. With this in mind, From There to Here and FRAN Fest can be viewed as a call to action… to caring about feminist matters and to materially manifest that care for future generations to inherit, so that ‘still-ness’ might give way to a growing and intergenerational, rhythmic movement, which is shared.
In 2017 FRAN Fest took place across multiple venues in South Australia from August 24 until September 24 with a FRAN Symposium September 16-17 at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
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