Lucy Davies
Ink on book pages
I am interested in making the invisibility of historical women artists tangible. Women have traditionally found it hard to be practicing artists, and those that did exist have often been erased from the histories of regional and international art movements. This double absence of women artists in the past has an important impact on our perspective today, and this is what I seek to evoke with my installation work - making space for thinking with the names and stories of those women who defied the norm. I have punctured the names of women artists from the past into the pages of canonical works of women’s writing, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. We only see their names when the light is cast through the pages. I hope that this gives the viewer a sensation of being in the presence of an absence; an important and — still — little-appreciated legacy of the past.