“BOUNDARIES” 1969
POPULAR PRESS But it is the sculpture here which will catch the eye, notably the whole room filled with blue-robed feminine figures, two of which bend disconsolately over a transparent box of real apples, silver specimens of which also lie about the sanded floor. The exhibit has no title and even a talk with the artist did little to clarify what she has in mind except to credit viewers with more perception than most of us have. The only thing that really matters is that the work is strikingly imaginative and the effect, I thought, quite beautiful. Somebody should put it on view, before it has to be broken up.
L.B.D. Birmingham Post, Saturday June 28 1969
ARTIST’S NOTES When I first went to Birmingham College of Art I wouldn’t discuss my work as I was afraid to trust its subjective content to virtual strangers. One day the staff and students refused to allow me to leave the seminar room, barring the door until I would say what it was ’about’. I asked them to describe what aspect of the work this applied to and when they listed formal questions I exclaimed with relief “Oh, is that all!”
Perhaps it would have been easier to discuss the more personal motivations behind the work with a female member of staff, but as was normal then, I had no tutoring from a woman artist at any time, on any course, and only the vaguest conscious awareness of this absence. Certainly the importance of the presence of appropriate female role models in educating women students was never realised, their absence from virtually all Art Colleges as lecturers or artists and their absence from the History of Art just weren’t issues which we as students were aware of. But what this unspoken absence signified to us (and others) in terms of our own invisibility as potential artists, had begun to be absorbed by me and was reflected in the anonymous, covered female figures in ‘Boundaries’. Consciously, this work attempted to alter the usual boundaries between the presence of the live spectator and the figurative ‘sculptures’ by various means, so that the visitor perceived that they were on and in the work, not separate from it. I was already concerned with the relationship of the spectators to art and was trying to identify and challenge outmoded concepts, which limited art to fixed categories and spectators to a fixed role and distance from it, keeping each estranged from the other and denying the possibility of really being touched by art.
Rose Garrard 1994
SITE Graduate Degree Show, Birmingham College of Art
COMPONENTS 24 life-size plaster figures, scattered chrome apples, real apples in a perspex container, various 2D multi-media wall structures related to the figures, all on a sand covered floor.