Say Something Back: an event exploring feminist artistic research: Rebecca Fortnum / Marita Fraser / Juliette Blightman / Caroline Douglas / Sharon Young / Chantal Faust

She said: What was that that you said? I said: Who said? She said: You said.
I said: Who me? She said: Yes you. I said: Not me, I’m dumb.
Chantal Faust, 2019

Accounting for historical omissions is a tried and trusted method of feminist scholarship, lives and work are necessarily ‘fished out of obscurity’, as the poet and philosopher Denise Riley has put it. But when the traces from the past become thin on the ground, or a more intimate register is called for, what artistic strategies can be used to recover the histories and work of women’s creative contribution?

The afternoon featured presentations from six artists, all of whom foreground research processes that use re-creations, re-enactments or suggest a possibility of entering into dialogue with the past. This conjuring forth of unknown or unseen lives and practices, as a kind of seance or act of ventriloquism, extracts women's voice from archives or texts, leading to the possibility of a recalibration of value.

The event was organised by Rebecca Fortnum, Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton and Professor of Fine Art at The Royal College of Art. It emerged from her project at Merton, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, that includes paintings and drawings of known and unknown female subjects from sculptural portraits in Museum collections, including the Ashmolean. Fortnum has had solo shows at the Freud Museum and the V&A’s Museum of Childhood and edited a book of interviews with British women artists, In their own words, as well as On Not Knowing; How Artists Think, a book of essays that examines contemporary artists’ processes.

Caroline Douglas is an artist who has exhibited internationally. She was the recipient of the 9th Helen Keller International Award and Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award (2016). Selected exhibitions include; Galerie Huit, Arles, Columbia University, Stills Gallery, Brighton Photo Fringe, Format Festival, Künstlerhaus Dortmund. Residencies include; School of the Art Institute Chicago, AiR Fondazione Fotografia, Modena and Proekt Fabrika, and Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews in 2016. She is currently undertaking a PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art, entitled Retouching The Archive: Unknown Women in Early Photography in Scotland. She will present her latest practice-led research, Newhaven Madonna. The paper questions using re-enactment as a method to explore the ethics and possibilities of recovering one C19th photography’s ‘unknown women’: the Newhaven ‘fishwife’, Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall.