The exhibition Entangled is really all about artist's fascination with with making and
materials, and all the artists in the exhibition from the 20th century right through to the present
of experimenting with their chosen materials. The whole conversation started a few years ago
and came out of many studio visits that I made with women and how I started thinking that women
worked in a different way than men. The question is not so much aesthetics but the actual physicality
and the use of the hand. We have 45 artists, some all over the world and the only thing they have
in common is that they're all women and their use of materiality. I feel as a woman artist
that I am outside of things but I quite enjoy that position and I'm kind of used to it now.
There is no real path, I think if you're a female artist you have to find your own way and create
your own opportunities and there are plenty of opportunities for men and women but I feel that
I have had to really fight to continue to make my work. A major influence has been the work of
Louise Bourgeois, I found the emotional content of her work so powerful and that really drove my own
practice. I suppose I was a bit obsessed by her approaches to different materials and her work
which gave me the confidence to kind of pursue my own direction and not play safe perhaps with certain
subject matter. It's not the emotions, I'm certain it is the intensity of the emotions are much too
much for me to handle that is why I transfer them I transfer the energy into sculpture. This
applies to everything I do it has nothing to do with the craft, it has nothing to do with
how to manage materials the materials are not the subject of the artist the subject of the
artist is emotions and ideas, both. A number of artists from mid 20th century such as Sonia
de Launay also Annie Albers and Hannah Regan they made radical new artistic statements. In the case
of Sonya de Launay she was hugely influential in the development of abstract art the first
abstract object that she made was a blanket for her baby son in 1911 and when she made this
abstract collage blanket and it reminded her of a cubist collage of the kind that painters like
Picasso were making at the time and she then took this idea and applied this very radical
colorful abstract language to a whole range of different techniques and media throughout her
career so she was a hugely influential figure.
...
Having historic figures against young figures is really interesting as well and giving younger
artists a chance to respond to this work so that you respond to the wonderful work of
Eva Hesse. While she had a very short life had a very influential life in the art world. I think
if I really opened the kind of minimalistic language and she put a kind of organic view to
it began to get a life and this is what for me is an important key of her work. Women weren't even
seen so that you were invisible, Eva was doing this extraordinary work and being seen by a few
people so that broke some barriers and I could see the cracks happening in the male-dominated
system. Her belief was simple, I'm an artist and I want to be known as my own artist, any time they
tried to make her a woman artist she got furious. Well since I was a kid I always enjoyed making
things but I didn't know so much about art, I had these ideas of what an artist was then
I was introduced to work for example of this wonderful Eva and I remember it was just
all of a sudden, it was just this window that opened and I knew where I belonged. There's this
certain line because I could have been kept out of it and then I also realized that I had been
looking at things and I had already been in that world but I didn't know how to communicate it
and it was like feeding a starving person. It was
exactly what I had been waiting for. She's telling me yet again
the work can come from you and it has this deep sense of intimacy and
closeness, you can still feel the presence of the act of making, the artist is there embedded in what you are looking at. To see Jude Scott who was born profoundly deaf and was finally institutionalized in a
sense but in a creative way and who wrapped things and you don't know what's inside them
we have a little name for one, we call it the mummy because it looks like there's a mummy
inside but who knows. But it gives other younger people an idea of how to use materials. I think
she's become a bolder more abstract artist and she's matured through her career she's almost
choosing more contemporary more modern materials she had the same access to those materials all
along but she's choosing different things. The genesis of a piece is often two or three
pieces of wood tied with a few pieces of string and then more string is tied and other pieces
added so the sort of first form the first ball happens quickly and then it can slow
down she might move to thread. My work is coming out of a very intimate approach to the world so
the touch is very important for me and when you see my works you understand that it's really a
kind of relationship to the material and the material needs me somewhere I'm not working
out of nothing, I'm into material I like to touch and I'm quite physical and how material becomes
a life with the touch you know. The the way that you can look at things and you have
this urge of just wanting to respond to it. You want to continue making more.