This Stuff Matters presents 'Still Here - Women Making Abstract Sculpture’ an exhibition investigating the position and relevance of women’s abstract sculpture in today’s contemporary art scene.
This Stuff Matters is an exhibiting group and discussion forum of four women abstract sculptors; Gillian Brent, Jill Gibson, Alexandra Harley, and Sheila Vollmer. They have invited two early career women sculptors Beatrice Galletley and Anna Reading to join them for this exhibition.
Each artist in This Stuff Matters plays confidently with form, material, colour, space and scale yet each artist’s work is distinct in the use of abstraction and construction. However, there is a definite sense of a common visual language and collective experience, emerging from a female perspective.
All four sculptors, who have been working and exhibiting since the 1980s, are died-in-the-wool feminists, although they don’t make art that would be considered to be about feminist issues. They have all avoided being seen as Women Sculptors, preferring to imagine that making art is by its nature an endeavour of equality.
‘Somewhere in the 1990s, the artist in her studio took a permanent backseat to the politics of assertion: the declarations of race, sexuality, and class. ‘Preciousness’ became a term used to denigrate abstraction. And yet the qualities it implied were arguably symptomatic of abstraction: a sensitivity to objects, and the disquieting intensity devoted to the process of making them.’
Jenni Sorkin, art historian, critic, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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