Woman Up!

In this month's Woman Up! we speak to one of Britain's leading art writers Hettie Judah.
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Hettie is currently working on a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition and on a book on art and motherhood.
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In this episode, Hettie talks to us about both her current work on issues surrounding artists with children, and her personal experience of combining her professional career, and parenting responsibilities.
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'There were artists who’d received awards for women artists that felt like they had to ‘come out’ as mothers...which is a ridiculous situation to be in. Or who were having residencies given to them and that they had to say ‘Well, I have 2 kids I can’t go away for 3 months... either I have to take my kids or I have to split this up and do it in different ways.......... Nobody is there to pick up and help these people... they’re just expected to fit around the needs of the gallery when actually it really costs the gallery or the institution nothing to say ‘well, can we shift this for a week? Could we shift this for a year? Would this event be easier for you if we did it at 11 am instead of 6 pm?’ You know, there are all these structures that we have established in the artworld and we expect everyone to just fit around them when there are really small changes that could be made to make things a lot easier for artist parents. It just takes a little bit of thought and to ask the right questions and for people to feel empowered to declare themselves openly.'
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Her most recent and upcoming books include Lapidarium (John Murray/ Penguin, 2022), How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022), Frida Kahlo (Laurence King, 2020) and Art London (ACC Art Books, 2019).
This episode was produced in partnership with Procreate Project

In this episode we went to Rogue Artists Studios in Manchester and spoke to ecxeptional artists Laura Yuile and Anna FC Smith
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Laura’s multidisciplinary practice explores the entanglements between domestic and urban space through matters of community, sustainability, and obsolescence, and the effects of globalisation and technological development. She exhibits internationally and alongside gallery-based exhibitions and events, she has organised a number of projects that filter into the everyday, commercial spaces that her work is engaged with. These have included Comfort Zones - a series of symposia on the subject of comfort zones held in the showrooms of various IKEA stores through the UK and China and a bus tour to a landfill site for Global Shadow Local Mist (2014). ASSET ARREST is an ongoing project and podcast series that addresses issues of financialized housing and real estate and their impact upon communities.
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Anna explores social history, folk culture and ritual through historical and anthropological research. Creating sculpture, installation, performance, and group actions her works emerge as multi-dimensional symbolic collages spanning eras, and forms of material culture. Touching on politics and performative space, she examines power and community, juxtaposing the ‘low culture’ and irreverence of communal tradition with the pageantry and ceremony of governance. Seeking links contemporary society has to its predecessors, she sees history and ritual as means to interpret the present.

Sangini is a Black and minorities women led community arts project that is committed to ending gender based violence. They seek to improve the quality of Black and minoritised and socially excluded women's lives by increasing their physical, mental and spiritual health through artistic, heritage, crafts and social activities that helps women recover from experiences of gender based violence whilst promoting cultural diversity.

Sangini seek to reach BME, disadvantaged and excluded women in innovative and creative ways whilst providing opportunities for tackling inequalities. Their previous projects have had a positive impact in encouraging women from different communities to engage in educational, creative and participatory activities by providing support and encouragement thereby removing the social and cultural barriers.
https://www.sangini.co.uk/about
Padma Rao, Director, Sangini is based in the North East of England, is also a contemporary visual artist practicing painting and contemporary drawing, a visiting lecturer, arts facilitator and a published poet.

Padma has over 20 years’ experience in the arts, heritage, community development, equalities and women’s issues. Padma has an art studio Makaan in South Shields, UK where she has shown works of art by artists based locally, nationally and internationally. A published poet, Padma has a background of working in the radio both at the BBC Radio Newcastle, as well as in India.

In her role at Sangini, Padma leads on the strategic development of Sangini’s programme of work that includes developing partnerships and sustainability and representation of Black women’s voices at local, regional and national networks.

Padma is passionate about the role and status of marginalised women in our current society and by exploring these issues through her work, both as an artist as well as in her role at Sangini, she aims to create a platform for the wider discussions around creativity, equality, feminism, identity and displacement of Black women.
Nasim Akhtar is an artist living near Durham. She loves the textures of different fabrics and make textile art and patchwork quilts. She's been sewing since she was very young. She uses watercolours and acrylics to make abstract images as well as using digital manipulation to finish a piece of art. Her art work is displayed at EDAN Art Gallery in Seaham. Art ran alongside a 30 year career in Probation Services, in particular working to develop on services for women who commit crime. Writing poems and short stories helped her to record reflections and events. She has a manuscript inspired by her father’s journey to the UK which shaped his family, including her. Nasim is also a member of Easignton Writers and a local book club.

Syowia Kyambi is an interdisciplinary artist and curator whose media spans across photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture and performance installation. She holds an MFA from Transart Institute (2020) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). Syowia is based in Nairobi and of Kenyan/German origin.

In Kyambi’s artistic practice history collapses into the contemporary through the interventions of mischievous and disruptive interlocutory agents who interrogate the legacy of hurt inflicted by colonial projects that still frame the wider political conjuncture of now. The work is messy, complex and uneasy requiring its viewers and participants to bear witness to an embodiment of collective experiences, and a constant search for links between the now and the morphed now that is encapsulated in her work while asking important questions about what is remembered, what is archived, and how we see the world anew.
She is one of the 4 members of the “What the hELL she doin!” collective. The members are all female-identifying artists from across the African continent and its Diasporas. Common to their respective practices are touchstones, which include but are not limited to: the body and what gets embodied, remembering and dismembering, standing and leaving, invisible creolization, and labor as geography.

In this episode we are at Friction Arts in Birmingham talking to Sandra Hall Artistic Director and co-founder of Friction Arts (alongside Lee Griffiths) and artists Natalie Mason and Savhanha Small Wyn.

For 30 years, Friction has produced an ambitious programme of creative work, often in partnership or collaboration with artists from all kinds of disciplines; currently it includes Birmingham’s only free visual art club for young people delivered by professional artists, a ground-breaking multicultural music programme in schools and community settings, our Culture Club for young people, A Word From the Wise – a programme celebrating the work of elders and older artists, currently through our ‘Home’ project, Walking Over Coals, with an artist development programme for emerging, emerged and submerging artists and an ever-evolving series of site-specific performances and interventions in a variety of settings like their between-lockdown show ‘Quiet Carnival’.

Natalie Mason is a performer-composer, facilitator and researcher.Natalie has been directing the Multicultural Music Making project (MMM) she created in partnership with Friction Arts. As a multi-instrumentalist, Natalie has performed and recorded internationally at the BBC Proms, FIFA World Cup, Symphony Hall and Real World Studios. She has been commissioned as a composer by Surge Orchestra, Flatpack Film Festival and Dorcha, with her music played on BBC Radio 3. She is a member of avant-pop experimental duo Kamura Obscura, co-curates alternative music night Club Integral Midlands Branch and recently completed a national tour with The Nightingales.

Savhanha Small Wyn, a poet, writer and mum to two under two of Vietnamese-Jamaican-British heritage. Savhanha is a poet and writer and has been published in the Visual Verse with my poem 'Pieces', and have since had three more published on their site ('A Knight's Tale', 'Firewatch', and 'Spring'), along with a piece published on Spare Parts Lit and another on Halu Halo Journal, and two more pieces to be published during 2023. Since having her children Savhanha has realised the difficulties of freelancing and childcare which inspired her to launch an Arts zine online called RECESSES, a multi-media zine that focuses on work that's been rejected, forgotten, or is new and experimental.