BRINGING UP GIRLS
Documentation of the performance of ‘The History is…’ a poem written to accompany Mary’s Monster and Friends at The Sky is Moving Sideways at Stephens House & Garden 2024, curated by Rebekah Dean. Supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Photography © Mandy Prowse, Rebekah Dean and Georgia Ward.
These black and white drawings as objects, collage together visual and sociopolitical narratives of matriarchs and monsters, in regard to eighteenth-century English philosopher and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary and her Monster, and strong, independent girls. Original made during a residency at Conway Hall, the home of the Ethical Society, they imagine the writer defiantly as a ‘hyena in a petticoat’, as she was called by Horace Walpole, who didn’t vlaue her outspoken opinion.
Did you know every hyena clan is a matriarchy ruled by an alpha female? Apt. Wollstonecraft wanted the power of ‘kings, priests and statesman’ removed, believing obstacles in the path to equality neither natural, nor divine. She understood the tacit process of social programming and called for change in education. She wanted boys to be brought up outside of male dominated society and girls to take control of themselves.
Tragically, Wollstonecraft died aged 38, 10 days after giving birth to her daughter Mary. Consumed by childbed fever, her doctor supposing her breast milk to be toxic, removed her newborn baby from her breast, and substituted suckling puppies to draw off the milk. Of interest also, is the foundation myth of empire builders, Romulus and Remus, twin boys suckled by a she-wolf.
What of Wollstonecraft’s daughters? Fanny Imlay, overdosed with laudanum aged twenty-one and Mary Godwin Shelley wrote the gothic story Frankenstein, the melancholic tale of a newborn man, who unloved becomes a monster.
First exhibited in 2014-15 for Finders Keepers Losers Weepers: Archaeology of mind and memory, a site-specific exhibition, interventions and symposium at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square.
CONWAY HALL TIME CAPSULE
Mary, 2014. Maquette. Ink on paper and archival tape. Included in SLWArtists Time Capsule, held in the Conway Hall Archive.
Time Capsule in the Conway Hall Archicve. Celebrating SLWArtists’ Residency 2014-15, Finders Keepers Losers Weepers – Archaeology of mind and memory.