What an experience!
I don’t see enough art. Living where I do, it’s not really possible to get to London and back in a day and for overnight stays I need to find a dogsitter. But my neighbour agreed to take Riley for a few days and so off I went.
As soon as I arrived, I met up with an artist friend to see the Rose Wylie sole show. At 92 years old, Rose has become the first woman to have a solo show at the beautiful Royal Academy. The show took up multiple cavernous rooms and as we walked round, my friend and I came to same conclusion. We are WAY too timid when we work! Rose works on huge canvases and paints in an extremely naive style. She subverts all ‘artistic’ rules and expectations and as a result, her work is unique, alive and - the word that kept coming to mind - ‘unapologetic.’ She works seemingly without any concern for what anyone else thinks - she is on her own journey to her own personal expression and it’s so exciting to see.
Next I visited the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern. Wow. Another unapologetic women, making her own art with no inhibitions. The work was very different from Rose’s - it was raw and intimate and much more personal - but once again, the word unapologetic came into my mind.
Two women of different generations, but both growing up in an era when girls were meant to be seen and not heard. Both somehow not taking any of that ‘good girl’ conditioning on board and instead forging their own unique, fearless paths.
I came back thinking a lot about this idea of fear and all the ways we keep ourselves imprisoned. So many of us don’t make what we want. We don’t try the thing we want to do because we have already decided that it won’t work. We build prison walls out of our beliefs and then settle in until we no longer realise we’re in a prison.
But someone gave us those beliefs - they’re not ours. Someone taught us to play small, be pretty, to make sure we don’t rock the boat and we carried that programming into our art, ensuring that what we make fits into existing norms and accepted styles. Lately I’ve been dismantling my own prison, brick by brick. One by one, I am removing those bricks and looking underneath them to see what has been hiding. It’s a slow process and I realise there is a lot to dismantle. I’m excited to see what I uncover and I hope to one day make work that is as fearless as the work I saw in London.
Bravo Tracey and Rose! Thank you for modelling what’s possible.
