Plinth

Private view: Wednesday 18th September 6-8pm
Saturday brunch: Saturday 21st September 10am-12pm
RSVP chloe@plinth.uk.com

Bridgeman Editions & Plinth present Suffragette City, an exhibition of female artists’ work responding to London – and redressing their historical absence from its canon narrative.

Suffragette City sees works from artists including Gillian Wearing, Bella Freud, Güler Ates, Cornelia Parker Carolina Mizrahi, Carinthia West and Fiona Banner engage with questions raised by London itself – as diverse, and as poignantly specific, as its inhabitants. Exhibiting as part of London Design Festival’s programme, Suffragette City strives to look futurewards by repositioning the past. From the fight for women’s suffrage to interrogations of the male gaze, from quiet interpretations of city living to themes of female erasure within it, ‘Suffragette City’ will span needlework, photography, sculpture and printmaking to ask new questions of timeless issues.

Gillian Wearing’s Courage Calls To Courage Everywhere takes us back to 1918, when the campaign for women’s suffrage won a major victory after years of activism from men and women across the UK. To mark its centenary, Plinth worked with the artist to produce an edition of 1,000 embroidered handkerchiefs, each featuring signatures from 50 of these historic figures alongside those of contemporary campaigner Caroline Criado Perez and Gillian Wearing herself.

Carinthia West takes on her own interrogations of the male gaze through the lens of her candid and intimate photographs of iconic women in 70s London and LA. An acclaimed journalist as well as a photographer, Carinthia’s photographs encapsulate a feeling of female freedom before the #MeToo era. Fame and celebrity are themes which are paramount in her photography – personal and up-close, capturing people who hit stardom in an era so different to our own.

Meanwhile, Carolina Mizrahi’s photography inverts the contemporary formulae to which we’ve become inured – the sexualised female form, flattened into ubiquity and objectification over adverts for everything from toothpaste to lingerie. Drawing on her work with Vogue, Elle and Swarovski amongst others, Mizrahi’s images of women subvert our collective touchstones whilst levying their powerful shorthands for contemporary femininity.

Güler Ates’ photography looks at London and its context through an altogether wider lens. Themes of gender, faith, and identity coalesce in explorations of cultural displacement: setting a recurring, veiled female figure within various lush or historic European interiors, Ates questions the relationship between veil and visible; object, and subject. Each architectural site holds links to colonialism, post-colonialism, and notions of the ‘East’, generating questions from their intersections and framing London as both a world city and an historical site of colonial power.

Cornelia Parker shows two pieces in ‘Suffragette City’ – Black Tulip, produced with Bridgeman Editions, and STOP, made with Plinth. STOPis based, in the artist’s words, “on a photograph I took of a battered parking notice on a 60’s council estate in N1. The signs are ubiquitous in London, displayed on all the estates of the period.” Out of context, though, Parker’s missive can be applied to anything and everything – “Stop eating, Stop drinking, Stop smoking, Stop thinking”, provocatively mimicking the chorus of chastising voices to which we’re all – women in particular – subject daily.

Bridgeman Editions is a new initiative from Bridgeman Images presenting a curated selection of limited edition prints by leading contemporary and emerging artists.

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