A woman’s place?

I am a painter whose work springs directly from my experience of the world around me. My work has always centred upon shared human experiences and has taken me to many different working environments, from the private world of my studio and home to more public arenas such as theatres, women’s refuges, hospitals and prisons. I have always been drawn to those places where human emotions and interactions are displayed at their most intense. In such places I am necessarily aware of the importance of gender – my own and those of others around me. In some places where I have worked, such as St Mary’s Maternity Unit in Manchester and Glossop Women’s Refuge, my identity as a woman was crucial to allow the work to happen at all.

However, in my residencies at Risley and Maidstone prisons, being a women proved to be significant in a more subtle way. My brief at Risley was straightforward: to develop work – both my own, and that of group of interested inmates whose work would be displayed alongside mine at Warrington Art Gallery. Despite being well briefed by prison staff about the dos and don’ts of working in this environment, I soon realised that I could take nothing for granted – least of all my own sense of displacement as I left the workshops each day and walked through the prison gates, free to return to the outside world, knowing that those inside could not. Through a series of structured studio sessions I began to discover the strengths and interests of each individual, and as their confidence increased they began to work independently. My own work developed in response to my limited understanding of their day-to-day existence, we talked and worked together and as we did so a mutual trust and confidence developed. I found myself drawing and painting what in another situation would be the most mundane of subjects, but here was charged with an inevitable poignancy and significance.
My time at Maidstone was more problematic. Here, instead of working with a group of well-motivated individuals coming to the end of their sentences, I had a group of long-term inmates. The beginning of the project was very difficult. I was an outsider in a tough environment and initially, at least I was not allowed to forget that fact. On my arrival I found the men were working separately around a large impersonal room and were strongly resistant to coming together to work as a group. Further to this, the materials that I had been promised by a well-known art supplier failed to materialise and it was only as the inmates watched me attempt to put this to rights – to create for them something out of nothing – that things began slowly to change for the better. Step by step, as the weeks progressed, I was given their support and respect and as we improvised materials, we laughed, grumbled and made do, and a real working relation began to develop. Both these experiences have nourished my developing working practice as an artist and influenced my current work. My memories of the real people that I have met and worked with, especially those in prisons and such places, have nourished and sustained my sense of empathy with the unknown figures I find myself painting each day.