Home From Home exhibition alongside Leeds Artist Book Fair

I made a series of embroidered hoops called Stitched Up a couple months ago, and was really pleased when this call out for art came along, and Louise Atkinson (curator on behalf of ABC) wanted to include it, as well as a new piece I proposed specially for the show.

This is some info from the facebook page:

Preview: Fri 11th March 6 - 8pm

Refreshments provided but feel free to BYOB too!
Exhibition continues Sat 12th - Fri 18th March (closed Sunday)
Opening hours 11am - 5pm
Also open 6 - 8pm for scheduled performances during the week.
With ideas ranging from the domestic to displacement, over 80 artists from 7 different countries have contributed to this years Artist Book Collective exhibition around the theme of Home. 153 Woodhouse Lane is the setting for Home from Home, to be shown alongside the 14th Leeds International Artist Book Fair. As a spacious Victorian terrace situated over three floors, it provides the perfect backdrop for this site-specific exhibition.

The image below is an arrangement of all the pieces in Stitched Up. 

I wanted to depict how woman are (born) ‘stitched up’. The hoops depict: Marking lines for facial cosmetic surgery, Caesarean scar, Mastectomy scar, Aborted fetus, Surgical instruments, Corset, Chinese footbinding, Hospital bed, Female genital circumcision Type lll scar, Surgeon’s mask, Cervical cancer cells, and Gynaecology Chair. A normally private sphere of the tools and results of mutilation, operations, and surgical procedures imposed by society and culture, including women, on themselves, and on each other, are bared for all to see. The format, like a specimen container, puts these female issues under the microscope. Feminine pain, loss and sadness are counterweighted by insecurity, vanity, and obsessiveness. We are specimens under constant scrutiny, with skin stretched, tweeked and slashed, needles pulled, eternally viewed.

The Four Sufferings (birth, ageing, sickness and death) suited the theme of the exhibition with it's Victorian references. The series theatrically plays on our heritage where private suffering must live out on public display. In these pastiches of Victorian decor and motifs, enduring contradictions emerge: between dark and light; the bleak and the opulent, tragic and trivial. We must continually grapple with our mortality and our desires.

I selected 4 hoops for this piece and decided to use the largest for birth, when we have the most life left, and down to death. I worked the black yarn in sections to give a sense of form to what is only a silhouette. It was quite theraputic just working in one colour! The festooned pelmets where the most challenging aspect of the pieces. I also had to work out a hanging method before sending off. If you get to see the show, I'd love to get any comments you might have! 

My submission for the sub(Missive) exhibition, accompanying the 12th Leeds International Contemporary Artist Book Fair

Organised by Louise Atkinson and the Artist Book Collective, and showing alongside the Leeds Artist book Fair in March. The exhibition will travel to other venues, to be announced. Each participant was sent instructions, by post, by the person below them on a list.
Having been sent instructions by Alice Bradshaw with 4 blank beer mats, it was no easy feat to create a work that had some meaning, but was accessible too.

I hope the exhibition goes really well (a little birdy told me members of the Tate will be visiting!) and with a lot of luck and determination, I might even be able to turn up myself!
Here's the blurb for my work:

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM
A presentation, a setting, a reading.

4 beer mats and a facsimile pub table present a setting to glimpse at women’s progress with alcohol, through the 20th C, from ‘protesting liquor prude’ to ‘shameless imprudent drinking hussy’. Whether tea-total or drunk, women are more harshly judged than men by society.
The 20th C was marked by women’s attempt to escape oppression, subjugation and belittlement by men. At the turn of the century a few women tried to control men and their vile habits by trying to outlaw liquor. Unfortunately, this back lashed, and made them look like bad sports, and rather unattractive to men.
Later, with new found freedom, and a realisation that drinking was kinda nice after all they demanded the right to drink alongside men in bars and pubs. But, still on men’s terms, a woman could only enter the pub with a man, or with a group of women. If she went on her own, she was seen as a lush.
Later still, a new dawn of women’s lib hit both sides of the Atlantic, and women took to drinking with confidence. It still wasn’t that cool to go out drinking on your own, unless you knew the barman by name, were middle-aged and a bit scarred emotionally.
Now, women everywhere have finally caught up with the opposite sex, and are drinking with complete abandon: clubbing all night, throwing up in the toilet, and collapsing in the gutter. Although a woman might end up alone on one of these binges, she probably started out with a man or a bunch of females, as society still has hypocritical views on women and drinking. On the surface women have equal rights to drink themselves to death, but society, and health authorities, still judges them more harshly for it.
4 beer mats provide a brief reading of 4 stages of women and drink: promoting them on the surface; elaborating in a facetious way on the reverse side, and covering up the insidious stain on women’s lives, ingrained in reality.

Look out for future showing at Beer Mat exhibition with Temporary Art Space in May.


Beer mats, grey board, book cloth, ink jet printed paper, craft spray, acid free binder’s paste, and pva glues and linen thread.

Leslie Wilson-Rutterford
London 2009