2023
32 ceramic terracotta figures with hand-painted blue and white glaze detail
each 14.9 cm x 14.9 cm x 9.3 cm
For this piece, Sophia has created a ceramic installation which is using the research of old drawings to think about the creative opportunities afforded to women artists in 18th-century Britain, and the history of gender biased museum collecting. The work has been a direct response to the British Museum’s holding of Grand Tour drawings, looking specifically at those done by male amateur draughtsmen, such as Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 2nd Baronet, George Keate, Sir George Beaumont, Heneage Finch, 4th Earl of Aylesford etc.
Though their historic collections hold very few works by female artists of any kind, the British Museum holds a wealth of fully attributed amateur drawings by men who completed the Grand Tour, a customary European trip undertaken by wealthy men during the 17th to early 19th centuries in order to obtain a cultural and social education. It is rare for museums to hold such well documented and vast collections of art by amateur artists, but on this occasion this can be explained by their status in society, generally as male members of the aristocracy. Even in cases where accomplished women artists are included in the records, they are often listed as ‘anonymous’ or labelled simply as ‘Lady artist’. The title of the work, ‘Anonymous was a Woman Enclosed’, comes from a common rephrasing of a Virginia Woolf quote. “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’. An earlier writer, Katharine Bradley, known under her pen name Michael Field, wrote “[We women] have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.” As in writing, talent in art was not promoted by public institutions of the time. Recent studies have shown that a work of art has historically been valued higher labelled ‘anonymous’, than with the name of a woman.
For this project, Sophia has created an installation of ceramic sculptures set in individually framed wooden boxes, laid out in the form of a large wooden display cabinet. Each sculpture is a roughly formed figure made from terracotta, wrestling with the cubed spaces of the cabinet. They have been dipped in slip and then overlaid with a glazed design. The designs are faithful copies of the drawings mentioned above. They have been meticulously hand-painted blue in a style imitating the Spode patterns ‘Blue Italian’ and ‘the City of Corinth’. These patterns were originally designed to cater to a taste for the classical Mediterranean, which was brought back to Britain by Grand Tourists. The patterns were inspired by the decorative objects that they returned with, objects that were displayed in the household to indicate that a man had attained a cultural education. The cabinet is a grotesque imagined expression of the feelings of frustration a woman of the same class might have felt approaching these cultural objects, which for them were possibly the only form of international cultural education they had access to. It is also a real personal expression of frustration Sophia has experienced experiencing history through mens eyes throughout her life and her career. She has made 32 figures. With the many trapped and struggling, highly-patterned figures, she wants to create a feeling of claustrophobia and overwhelm. They are handheld expressions, giving a sense of squeezing, a raw, impulsive, instinctual physical response. The looseness acts as a contradiction to the meticulous painting, which symbolises a veneer of repectability required in Regency society. The ‘Enclosed’ of the title (which she has added) refers to the feeling of entrapment, she believe creative women of this class must have felt, and a personal response to feeling categorised as a female artist. Therefore Sophia has placed genuine emotion in a space which is usually reserved for positive representations of self and objects of desire, the display cabinet. Here instead the display cabinet acts like the panopticon prison, emotions like prisoners held hostage.
The labour involved in this piece is crucial to the concept, the cabinet making, the frame making, the intricately painted figures copied from existing drawings, all indicate the careful fruitless labour creative women at the time experienced, in their copying of mens drawings rather than working from life abroad, in their intricate embroidery studies, and all the countless other artistic exercises labelled ‘women’s work’.
The space has been designed to imitate a wall display from a historic home, using a heritage wall paint colour, and decorative period features (the impression of a skirting board), and a descriptive wall panel. Sophia wants to give the impression to the viewer that they have stumbled on a work in a National Trust property. With this piece, she is inventing a space for a creative woman of the period’s artistic expression, but with the misattribution on an accompanying panel, she is also highlighting the problem of representation within public museum collections.
Taking this further Sophia would like to exhibit it alongside the original drawings from the British Museum’s collection or make the work site-specific, and respond to a collection from a historic house, exhibiting the work among the collection.
