How We Live Now opened at the Barbican in 2021, the exhibition holds the Matrix Feminist Design Collective Archive, the exhibition was designed by Edit collective, curated by Jon Astbury. Following its closure in December 2021, the exhibition has been brought to Newcastle Contemporary Art Gallery. This exhibition is curated by Helen Smith and Claire Harper and features a project space in which these works are exhibited.
Behind the Desk
‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’
Was famously written by Virginia Woolf in 1929. If women need space to write, women need space to expand. Making space matters. Taking up space matters. This desk questions;
how much space are women really allowed to take up?
There is no region in England where the average home to rent is affordable for a woman on median earnings and renting takes an average of 43% of our earnings to men’s 28%. To buy a property with a typical mortgage, women’s incomes fall over 50% short in most regions, except in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber. Men’s incomes only fall over 50% short in London and the South East. (Women’s Budget Group, 2020).
The desk captures studying gender in space whilst working at muf architecture/art and moving between the spaces of architecture, city, protest and activism. The casts represent spaces taken up in the city, spaces where she can expand, which are then collected back into the constricted desk.
The desk is a place for a woman to think and to create space for herself, the desk is an intensively private space, yet public as a woman is always consumed by others.
This piece asks the viewer to climb into the desk, to question themselves, to look within themselves and to consider their bodies in space. The desk asks you to consider the issues of access to space and how this effects each individual, the viewer themselves, women, me, you and others.
Running for Repair II
Transpose yourself in the space of the woman runner.
Inter-dispersed with the scenes of the streets, the piece captures the essence of what is it to put a female body in space. All space is political, and women’s bodies are catalysts for the fear of progress. This installation follows the traces left behind by my female feet, my female breath, my female experience and creates a constellation of the lived experience of the wunner.
Moments of power.
Moments of fear.
Moments of pain.
Moments of progress.
The wunner must be defined separately from a runner; a wunner is a woman runner who requires her own title to acknowledge the female running experience differs greatly from that of her male counterparts.
Wunners tentatively scale the city and subsequently take ownership of the streets. Wunners put themselves into spaces, risking their safety. This is subversive action; women using spaces designed by men, by the patriarchal system for the performance of running. An act which is powerful and expansive yet attracts attack through the exposing of a female body in public space. The tension is clear; womens space is expanded, physically and mentally by wunning. Physically, as one can take ownership of more of the city. Emotionally, it can create an empowerment and allow women to reject societal expectations.
This performance captures the experience of a wunner, it allows the viewer to step into the body of the wunner and to reflect on how we can transform women’s experience of space.
