Collecting Lives, 16th Women’s History Network Conference (review)

Visual art was almost as important as words at this innovative conference. And what a joy it is to be able to say that about an academic event. Not only were there welcome strands on visual sources and material culture, but the organizers (Camilla Leach, Andrea Jacobs and Zoe Law, along with Joyce Goodman) had also taken the imaginative step of inviting an artist to make an art installation that responded to the preoccupations of those taking part. The enthusiasm with which Alex Hoare’s work was greeted suggests that every conference needs an artist in residence as much as it needs food, bookstalls and beds.

Weeks before the conference, Alex invited participants to send her a photo or quotations related to the historical women we are studying. Then in a peaceful room off the main corridor she created a video display that wove our subjects and ourselves together in a beautiful shadowy dance. In its images sometimes the modern conference (both paper presentations and the evening’s circle dance) was to the fore, and at other times our female subjects.

This, of course, reflects the way our subjects’ lives can become so intermixed with ours, as we spend years tracing their movements, figuring out the development of their ideas, reading their letters and becoming their most intimate scrutinizers. It also mirrored the way our foremothers, in a shadowy way, were present at the conference too. For example, Sybil Campbell, who built up the British Federation of University Women Library now stored just yards from us: the Library Trustees sponsored the reception. And Barbara Bodichon, whose physical remains were to some extent in our hands, as we were reminded by an appeal for funds to restore the broken railings and near illegible description of the deteriorating Brightling tomb in which she – though not her ideas – was buried in 1891. (To donate, contact: http://innovatecentre.co.uk/solon/conferences.htm )

Alex worked through the night so that all the final day we could see a screening of the video and experience the installation with film projections. An interesting bonus was that in the crowded space our here-and-now spectating bodies accidentally got in the way of the projector’s beam, which created yet another dimension, another layer of female participants. The DVD of this screening will be saved and stored for others to access. Conference participants were so excited by it that there are plans for this exhibition to travel. (Alex can be contacted via http://www.alexhoare.co.uk ).

Along with the video projection was a collaged painting, which included photos (using an image-transfer process that ‘distressed’ them interestingly, as time does too). It also used semi-obscured, sometimes bleached-out text, reminding us that old texts can be difficult to ‘see’ fully and that meanings can become almost unreadable to modern readers.

There was also a textile piece. A frayed old piece of canvas, threads deliberately unravelled at the edges, which had old photographs stitched into it. The threads jointed the women together and each was labelled with a letter. The images on the canvas rug were linked by a trail of pink rose petals to a blank canvas at the back of the installation containing luggage labels marked with a single rose petal and the names of the women whose images were depicted on the rug. Some labels were left blank for the women yet to be uncovered.

These art works reflected poignantly the more subjective elements of the process of collecting women’s lives that could so easily not be mentioned: how our women subjects from so long ago connect with our own subjectivity today, what the material state of their remnants says about their subsequent valuing by others; how they can almost become our shadows (or are we theirs?) after years of this one-sided relationship.

And now to the words.

The first of the three plenaries was a panel on ‘collecting women’ by Joyce Goodman, Gerry...