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.
Women's courses since the 1970s have become a familiar if marginalised component of most art school curricula, their initial aim being to compensate for the absence of women in the Art History and Theory syllabus and to encourage the development of feminist art practices.
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.
Review Bad Girls: Institute of Contemporary Art London 7 October - 5 December 1993. Using glamour, virginity and stardom to attract as wide an audience as possible to a show of supposedly anarchic women artists all hoping to confront notions of sexuality and gender was a smart, if questionable, move....
The Women's Art Register contains a public access slide library of 20,000 slides, 14,000 information folders representing (as at 1994) 2,400 Australian based women artists.
Some reflections on a paper entitled the Horror of the Gaze. Art criticism is, perhaps, an art form and not expected primarily to make sense. There is no consensus about what art is, but we do seem to share an urge to understand what critics say about it.
"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