Interview with Margaret Harrison

06/01/16

Interview: Margaret Harrison

Margaret Harrison (b1940) has been at the forefront of British feminist and activist art since her solo show of drawings and watercolours – including images of women as hamburger fillings and Captain America with fake breasts and high heels – was closed down on the grounds of “indecency” in 1971. Throughout the 70s and 80s, she collaborated with her husband, Conrad Atkinson, and other female artists, as well as working alone, to produce work documenting the plight of underpaid homeworkers, rape victims, factory workers and more. Her work Rape (1978) was included in the controversial 1979 Arts Council show, Lives, curated by Derek Boshier, where it attracted a lot of attention from the press and public alike.

With a recent revisiting of some of her early works, winning the Northern Art Prize in 2013, and a current survey exhibition, Accumulations, at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Harrison speaks to Studio International about some of her early memories and pioneering projects.

Read the interview here

Interview with Deb Covell

01/10/14

Deb Covell: interview

Deb Covell (b1966) is a painter who seeks to celebrate the material qualities of paint. Rejecting pictorial imagery, she also eschews the traditional canvas support, producing paintings that hang from walls like drapes or lie folded and crumpled on the floor. There is a sculptural element to her works, but, she explains, it is far more about form, materiality and the versatility of paint.

Covell has just completed a very full on month-long residency, open studio and exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art but there is no time for a rest, as she is soon to be exhibiting in a group show in New York City. Luckily she managed to find time to answer Studio International’s questions.

To read the interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/deb-covell-interview-from-nowt-to-summat-sha-boogie-bop

Review of Louise Bourgeois: A Woman Without Secrets at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

15/08/14

Louise Bourgeois: A Woman Without Secrets

ARTIST ROOMS On Tour

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough

18 July – 12 October 2014

“When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It’s a circle going round and round.” Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) posed these questions in 1991, speaking about her series of sculptural works, Cells. “Fear is pain,” she went on, before admitting that emotions are the primary subject of her work – emotions, contradictions and the childhood trauma of living with the knowledge of her father’s affair with her English governess.

The feisty and widely read artist, born in Paris, but an American citizen from 1955, died not long before reaching her centenary. She left behind a great body of work examining the interplay between such opposites as male and female, father and mother, soft and hard, exterior and interior, vulnerability and strength. Her recurring motifs at first appear simple, but, as her assistant and friend for more than 30 years, Jerry Gorovoy, says: “The more time you spend with her work, the more complex it is.” Rather like a spider’s web, one might suggest.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/louise-bourgeois-woman-without-secrets-review-sculpture-maman