Paying My Dues: responding to the Women's Art Library Archive

Watch This Space exhibition at Goldsmiths College in 2018 was a culmination of Claire’s residency at the Women’s Art Library:

“As Artist in Residence at the Women’s Art Library I am revisiting my own archive, as well as looking at the work of other women, to see what chimes and what I can learn in terms of how to represent my current experience. Are there models that I can develop (or reject)? I’m searching for clues. 

Curator of WAL, Althea Greenan has suggested artists, or I have come across work, or looked up artists on a whim - Rebecca Horn sent me to the Fan Museum, Eileen Agar’s memoir gave me inspiration for creating new self-portraits, as well as a ceremonial hat for eating bouillabaisse. Jo Spence was a friend, and I have reassessed her work in this new context, and I’ve met with Rosy Martin to discuss collaborations, and the politics of crediting. 

My early work drew on archetypes, exploding them to create new identities that I felt fitted me better. Milky Way, commissioned for Camerawork’s Imaging the Future in 1988, resonates now in a way I could not have known, half a lifetime ago. Some of my photos then were made through a process of play, and I would not really understand until I began to print them what it was I was trying to achieve. With Milky Way, I remember, I had a very definite idea: I drew the set and realised it (pre-Photoshop) exactly as planned. When I revisit this image now I am flabbergasted. My rationale then was to stage a treatise on the ‘virgin and mother double standards’ and the ‘fiction of science’. Now this image speaks to me about how deeply rooted the mythologising of our flesh is, and the resulting pressures on women to conform. Breasts are the property of society; we transgress at our peril. 

I’m using this WAL residency to explore my ‘new normal’, and expanding the range of ways that I see myself reflected back in the world. I’m not ruling anything out: sometimes an ordinary activity such as using public changing rooms can feel like an artwork.” 

Catalogue Notes:

ROSY MARTIN
1992 ‘I never studied photography,’ I tell Rosy; ‘I just made it up as I went along.’ 
‘What ingenue crap,’ Rosy says. She is lying on a kitchen floor in Exeter, blowing cigarette smoke out of a cat flap. We are houseguests of the Visual Arts Officer, who doesn’t smoke. Rosy smokes a lot. Rosy is quite intimidating, but we get on, so long I don’t come out with ingenue crap. 

2017 Rosy and I arrange to meet at a Griselda Pollock lecture, possibly the most Feminist Artist date imaginable. She knows everyone. Afterwards, we eat at a Lebanese place in Camberwell where I lose a scarf the size of a bedsheet. We talk about crediting, collaborating, ground rules, hindsight. I realise I have not been great at crediting. Not much of what I have done has really been all my own work, and this seems important to realise. I want to acknowledge all the people who help. I need people. I can’t manage alone. These are not signs of weakness. Beginning on new collaborations, we discuss the detail of how we shall work; we establish ground rules, agree on how to credit and who owns what. Thanks, Rosy.

JO SPENCE
‘Whenever I see pylons in fields, I think of your bum,’ I tell Jo. That black and white photo of her shot from behind by Terry Dennett(?), the skin textures of a middle aged woman, the English pastoral. She returned to those themes in the Final Project, floating on her back, the pool superimposed with field. I love this gentler aspect to her work. I visit Jo at her home. She tells me there are certain subjects I will not be able to work on until my mother is dead. I think she’s wrong, but turns out not. Jo has been in a long conversation with me since her death. I keep hearing stuff she said, and it makes sense now.

TERRY DENNETT
When mum is diagnosed with cancer, we are in a remote river bed in AndalucÍa.  Jo has been dead four years. I phone Terry. Do you have access to a fax? He asks. Our neighbour Pam is Deaf, and uses a fax in place of a phone. For the next eighteen months, Pam delivers reams of fax. Terry sends us articles on Native American herbs, coffee enemas, food combining, patient centred treatments, and pharma politics. I make new work documenting our day to day lives - close up photos of drugs, blown up and repeated as pure pattern, height charts in Cash’s name tapes, word portraits of each other printed in Braille. Keep a journal, Terry says. Write or be written off, Jo says. Jo is still talking to me.

HELEN CHADWICK
Helen is wearing a leather tunic that gives her the air of a principal boy. She’s giving a talk at the National Portrait Gallery on the self-portraiture photography exhibition featuring Ego Geometria Sum - architectural blueprints of Helen posing in archetypal shapes representing her progression through time. The work is positioned according to spatial rules worked out by an astrophysicist. There is logic and madness here. Helen is smart; she reframes the modern with classical allusions in a way that I find exciting and inspirational. I am terribly eager. Helen is terribly kind. Are you an artist? She asks. I think I say yes.

REBECCA HORN
Rebecca exposed herself to some bad chemicals early in her art making, and as a result was ill for a very long time. I didn’t know this, but it makes perfect sense now, revisiting her work, and wondering how illness informed it. I saw her work in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery, where a piano hung like a bat from the ceiling. There were sleek black feathers, finger extending talons, and strap on sails pleating and fanning like accordion bellows. I was there with my Mum, and we played like we were at a funfair. We trusted the play would not be too sinister, because it had a definite edge to it. I think of Rebecca when I visit the Greenwich Fan Museum. It has no edge to it. It needs an injection of Rebecca. There is no sweat here, just glowing ladies on grand tours, and coquettish mystique. I want to make the sort of fans Rebecca might make, ones for women who overheat.