Abigail Webster: This is a quote from Mary Armour in 1990:
'I was so excited and nervous, and carrying so much, that I got stuck in Rennie Mackintosh's swinging door.
My advice to any young women walking through the door today: it won't be easy
the life of an artist is never easy. Things have changed some though,
and there are now more and more opportunities for women in art and design'.
Glasgow School of Art was established in 1845.
The first female tutor, Elizabeth Patrick, was appointed in 1855.
ECA had females tutors from the start.
It was established as an amalgamation of different art schools in 1908.
With Glasgow Fra Newbery was appointed in 1885
and he did a lot to include female tutors and students as part of the general curriculum.
Moyna Flannigan: I think he was a really progressive individual
because he tried to elevate the art school from being a somewhat provincial place
to actually being a leading institution, and he saw women as being at the centre of that.
He also wanted to employ practicing artists, rather than people who had a certificate in education.
Did you have any female tutors?
John Beagles: Yeah, undergraduate there weren't very many.
Phyllida Barlow, Sharon Morris, Susan Hiller -
but never taught me directly because I was in the painting department.
Female tutors tended to be in the media departments -
sculpture and painting were still the preserve of men who hit things with hammers
and paintbrushes as extensions of parts of their bodies.
Webster: My experience was that female tutors could be more receptive to different forms of dialogue
or avenues of conversation that male tutors could sometimes be more dismissive of.
Beagles: Mm hmm.
Webster: That can play a huge part in women having the confidence to articulate their views
and their experiences, and their ideas, and the ways in which that manifest in their art practice.
Beagles: To be sweepingly stereotypical, there's often the tendency
with a lot of male tutors to be quite dismissive.
Webster: Is it the idea that it's a reflexive, collaborative process then?
Beagles: I think it should be. I think we're all involved in the process
at different levels, with different level of experience.
Why did you get to teaching?
Flannigan: Well I got into teaching to support my practice
because I couldn't make a living out of selling my work only.
The rewarding part of teaching is the exchange that goes on - which can be quite provocative on both sides.
Beagles: Yeah.
Flannigan: You both learn, basically.
Probably teaching 100 years ago was much more about about that master/student idea -
where you were passing on your knowledge and experience to the student.
Beagles: Masculine modes of teaching, isn't it? 'The master', you know?
Which wasn't my experience, and the good, positive female tutors I had -
they didn't behave in that way, so that was quite radically different I think -
in terms of the sensibility that they had.
They never presupposed that they had all the answers.
Webster: Do you think that there is aspects of that legacy that still occur today?
Beagles: Yeah, that's not gone away. It's not gender specific -
You can get female tutors like that as well.
Flannigan: I think it's much less hierarchical than it used to be.
Beagles: Yeah.
There's been a real breakdown of that kind of model of authority, yeah.
Flannigan: Yeah.
Webster: Looking back to the history of the exhibition -
I always find that interesting, in relation to the fact that, in the late 1800s/early 1900s -
it only really was middle-class women that had access to art skills at that time.
There's other arguments that can also be encompassed in terms of other demographics
I suppose, and I think that can be more problematic - different class backgrounds, queer representation,
different ethnic backgrounds which aren't particularly represented in Scottish art schools at this time
Beagles: So why do you think we don't know much about the history of women art tutors in Scotland?
Flannigan: Well I think one of the things that is highlighted by the show
is that these women have been hidden.
Obviously they've gone through the art school system, but then they've somehow disappeared.
One of the interesting things about Norah Neilson Gray was that she went out to the First World War
and recorded some of the things that she saw.
And yet we don't know her paintings in the way that we might know other artists -
like Nash, for instance.
Beagles: So that's potentially more or less perhaps a responsibility of art historians
perhaps curators in some of the major institutions?
Flannigan: That's right, yes.
And, I think actually, a much broader cultural issue about attitudes.
They are under-represented overall.
Beagles: What would be a partial solution, in the context of the recent issue of Scottish art?
Rewriting of the histories?
Flannigan: By women?
If the story is, and has been, largely written by men -
yeah, perhaps women have been left out of that - for one reason or another.