“VASO DI PANDORA” 1984
ART PRESS I have left the best till last. Rose Garrard and Helen Chadwick are both outstanding. They consider the role of women in today's society: without stridency; with sensitivity and sympathy ... Garrard's installation continues her preoccupation with Pandora, this time comprising a tableau in pink and blue where Adam and Eve - or eternal man and woman - live out their lives between grief and guns; sweet joy and swallows.
Claire Henry, Studio International, Autumn 1984
ARTIST'S NOTES I won't give up looking at either a male or a female image. There is always a danger for women artists that they can't produce a female nude because the language for reading the female nude is so heavily weighted with male values. There is a danger that it is impossible within feminist theory, or has been until recently, to support the production of a female nude image by a woman artist, particularly one which is about sensuality or sexuality, because of the difficulty of it being read in any other but this male context.
So a lot of work has been done to change these traditional patriarchal contexts in which images appear and are read, and I suppose that's where I'm primarily working at the moment. I'm trying to clarify the prejudiced meanings that exist and trace them to their origins in history and myth. There's still a lot of work to be done, to establish feminist contexts for work which will allow a female language to develop.
Rose Garrard in conversation with Marion Roberts (of Birmingham Post) 1984
POPULAR PRESS People do not give up power voluntarily unless it is in their own self interest. Why should men change, just because women expect them to? They have the upper hand at every level - the personal, political, economic, sexual - and in the family.
The only way men will be persuaded to give up their supremacy will be if they themselves begin to value the aspects of life denied to them. This means believing that it is as damaging to deny gentleness to men as to deny ambition and aggression to women. It means valuing parenthood as much as we value banking. It means valuing the personal and the private lives of people as much as their working and public lives.
Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, January 1987
SITE
'Aperto' 41 st Venice Biennale 1984
COMPONENTS
Four large scale paintings on calico with plaster objects, vases and columns.