Women from non-English speaking backgrounds are adding another dimension to the picture of women in Australian art. Informed by other cultures and dealing with issues of ethnic difference, the images on these pages create a broader idea of what it is to be an Australian woman.
What does it mean to present as a 'lesbian' artist? The very identity categories 'gay', 'lesbian', 'heterosexual' are extremely problematic. Now that 'I' am out, I find that I am in - inside a category that reduces rather than expands possibilities for me, not just as an artist, but as a person.
"Women in art must look to the future as they have no past" said Mary Cecil Allen at an opening of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1935. A critical examination of the current art practices of women in Australia.
All New Gen Game Girl
by VNS Matrix
(Josephine Starrs, Francesca Da Rimini, Julianne Pierce, Virginia Barratt), Experimental Art Foundation
Adelaide South Australia
21 October - 21 November 1993
During the past 8 years or so there have been two distinctive strands of activity which women artists have pursued in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Both are concerned with questions of identity. Artists Fiona Pardington, Emily Karaka, Shona Davies, Christine Webster and Robyn Kahukiwa.
The artists were selected because their work embraces not only questions of gender, but also addresses the distinctive duality between the superficial look of things and the complex web of underlying meaning, desire, fear, experience, and memory that they have located and interpreted for us. Featured artists are Jane Eisemann, Jacqui Stockdale, K.T. Prescott, Helen Wright and Megan J Walch.