On June 4th, Hester Reeve, one of the commissioned artists from Out of the Archives, celebrated and promoted ‘Emily Davison Day’ at the Epsom Derby. On this date, 93 years ago, Emily Davison was injured and later died as a result of running onto the race track and attempting to pin two suffragette flags onto the king’s horse. She was an active and determined Suffragette and the exact circumstances surrounding her death are still unknown. Emily Davsion’s fateful action on June 4th 1913 is regarded in the popular imagination as a watershed moment in the campaign to get women the vote.

More about Hester’s art installation in conjunction with Olivia Plender can be found here:

http://thumbsforhire.co.uk/outofthearchives/?page_id=121

Hester's Emily Davison Day action is documented thanks to the race horse photographer George Selwyn

Yesterday afternoon The Women’s Library was visited by the lovely Jane Garvey from Woman’s Hour to record a feature on our recent exhibitions, Out of the Archives and FeMAIL, which aired this morning.

Out of the Archives artists Helen Cammock and Hester Reeve and curator Anna Colin chatted to Jane about what inspired them in The Women’s Library archive and how all the artists created their final pieces.

You can listen to the whole show for the next week here on the BBC iPlayer. The piece on The Women’s Library starts about twelve minutes in.

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Here is the excellent Out of the Archives poster.

They will be going up in our foyer today!

Want to know what all this Out of the Archives caper is about? Well look no further:

The Women’s Library is pleased to announce Out of the Archives, the first group exhibition showcasing newly-created artworks inspired by items in the collection.

Working across a range of media from photography, to film and performance, the artists Helen Cammock, Marysia Lewandowska, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve, Eileen Simpson and Ben White have focused on specific cultural, social and political events represented in The Women’s Library archives. These include women’s migration to South Africa from the 1860s to the 1880s; militant suffragettes’ radical relationship to art and representation; post-World War Two folk revival; and the 1980s Greenham Common Women’s Peace Campaign.

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Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive)
The Brilliant and the Dark
2010
Music video production still featuring Gaggle
Photo credit: Kristel Raesaar

As part of their Out of the Archives commission, Eileen Simpson and Ben White from the Open Music Archive will be recreating, or reimagining The Brilliant and the Dark – a cantata for women’s voices. As part of their research, the pair have been looking through the costumes originally worn by the performers in the 1969 Royal Albert Hall production. From early Christian imagery to multi-coloured cloaks, the costumes played a very important role in creating the host of female characters featured in the opera.

These costumes are part of The Women’s Library’s permanent collection. To see what other archive material we have on The Brilliant and the Darki you can search the catalogue here

Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve,The Emily Davison Lodge, 2010. Photo by Matthew Booth

Inspired by the figure of the suffragette as militant artist, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve (pictured) have realised three works that explore how the suffragettes publicly denounced women’s subjugation.

Plender and Reeve call in to question the traditional separation between art and politics, through an exploration of the militant attacks waged on famous art works by suffragettes and artists such as Mary Richardson.

Using photography and video, the artists also revisit other emblematic moments of the suffragettes’ revolt, as well as their relationship to violence.

In these photos, Plender and Reeve can be seen in the archive stores of The Women’s Library, surrounded by some of the material that has inspired their commission. The WSPU tea set seen in the top photo dates back to 1913 and was produced by the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Find out more about the tea set by clicking here to search our catalogue.

The above image is part of the Greenham Common Women, Yellow Gate Collection created by Sarah Hipperson, held at The Women’s Library.

The artist Marysia Lewandowska has been using the Greenham Common archive collection as part of her research in to the  changing political climate of the 1980s.

Lewandowska is  interested in tracing the social movement of civil disobedience as it relates to women across generations and is therefore taking inspiration from the direct action of the Greenham Common campaigners. Her project will question how the now-familiar notions of self-organisation, sharing, participation and distributive networks operated in the era preceding the Internet and social networks.

To find out more about the material held on Greenham Common, you can do a general search of the archive collection here. To read about the Yellow Gate in particular, click here. To see what printed material we hold in relation to Greenham, please search here.

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Here at The Women’s Library we have huge collection of letters related to women’s history. However, there is one collection of letters in particular that has drawn the attention of our Out of the Archive artist, Helen Cammock.

Cammock, who is a co-director of the Brighton Photo Fringe and studying an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art, is currently looking at the stories and experiences of female emigrants to South Africa. In particular, Cammock is interested to see what sort of relationship developed between colonial emigrants and subaltern, or marginal, South African women.

This has led the artist to begin reading through the letters and papers related to South African emigration, of which the above is an example. This letter describes the circumstances of several women, journeying to South Africa. For instance:

“Beatrice Jane Letcher who is a refugee from Johannesburg and is now going out to her married sister. During the time she has been in England she has been working at Bradford for the Bradford Hosiery Co and her employer gives her an excellent character. She is bright and capable and of the right stamp.”

Cammock is currently working on producing a semi-fictional narrative for the exhibition, to further explore the relationships that formed between such women.

Illustration by Josephine Butler

As part of their commission for Out of the Archives, the artists Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve are looking at the troubled, turbulent and sometimes contradictory relationship between suffragettes and art.

Specifically, the Out of the Archivers will be looking at suffragettes like Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Richardson and Barbara Leigh Smith who were trained artists, but who waged militant attacks on famous works of art.

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