AM

I am originally from the South of Ireland. I have studied my undergraduate degree in Cork and then I moved to Belfast to do my MA. And later to San Francisco Art Institute to do a post-graduate there. In the 80s, Belfast was the only place in the island of Ireland with a Fine Arts MA course (in Ulster University). We were just in six people attending at the time, and you could choose between the two main “fine arts” disciplines: sculpture or painting. The way art was taught was very compartmentalised. For instance, I was interested in drawing rather than painting – my drawing was an act of resistance in response to a middle-class, and male-centred art world that privileged painting as the highest status art language. The art system at the time felt very hostile to somebody like me. Nonetheless, I had to do some paintings in order to get assessed for my master’s degree, I couldn’t just present drawings […] that was the state of art education at the time, so narrow-minded. I remember my tutor, Alastair MacLennan, had to give me the news that I wasn’t allowed to show only drawings for the degree show, there would have to be paintings too (even though he didn’t agree with that, and few years after he apologised to me). During my time in Ulster University, I was also made to remove one of my drawings from the foyer. The drawing was depicting a female body with opened legs and visible genitals, in the act of giving birth. Of course, there were complaints about the work, it was too explicit, too graphic, and - more contentiously - it represented the female body from a women’s point of view in a public place. While in college I felt my art production was continuously examined through a lens that was not my lens, there was no room for critiquing or re-defining the medium and the content of the works we were producing. This was the fault of the curriculum and the institution itself rather than individual tutors like McLennan who were very experimental.  Feminism was hardly spoken of however, and not brought into the critical dialogue in any form…we had to search that out ourselves.  Female tutors or visiting artists were very thin on the ground, as were visiting tutors from the south of Ireland.  Though I did get to meet Paula Rego, my hero at the time.  There was a lot of cross-border co-operation between artists on the ground at the time, but this was not reflected in the teaching practice.  The college was very UK centred and looked to London for its influence.  Work of a ‘political’ or controversial nature could be censored or blocked by institutions of the time, like the Ulster Museum. 

AM

During my MA and shortly after I graduated, I was sharing a flat in South Belfast with Louise Welsh and Fionna Barber. Louise and I were in the Masters course together. I felt that Louise was the one that was always involved with activism, especially women’s rights and queer rights, as well as she was part of the conversations for setting up a women’s artist group in NI. She was a great friend and a great example to me. I didn’t take part in the establishment of NIWAG or WAAG as far as I remember, but as a recent graduate, I was very keen to exhibit my work and take part in as many opportunities as possible. Compared with my experience in college, it was so liberating to be part in WAAG’s shows and projects, it was just great to be accepted in such an experimental project, and to meet like-minded people. 

Breeda and Pauline did an excellent work showing what was achievable. They were coming from a privileged position, but they had the bravery to go beyond that, and organise shows and events that were as inclusive as possible.  They were “open-to-all” shows, there was no selection, so the standards widely varied between mid-career artists, young graduates like me and Sunday painters. Every self-described “woman artist” was included, there was no censorship. For this reason, everybody ran wild. For the first time, artists could just do what they want as they want, in an inclusive, anti-hierarchical and supportive environment. It was extremely liberating and looking back at WAAG now I can see how ahead of its time it was, and made many people very nervous, as we had all been educated in such a hierarchical system.  Interestingly, WAAG still gets so little recognition or attention today, as if it were a kind of aberration and not a break-out movement. 

For us – women artists - it was essential to have the platform to experiment new media (videoart, performance), or mixed media (sculpture with textile art, ceramics, multi-media installations…) and new materials (body hairs, natural materials, found objects…). Cross disciplinary and cross cultural. Our artmaking was a conscious stance in rejection of the establishment, an act of resistance to the classist and misogynistic attitude of the arts and society. We felt that in the late 80s, traditional sculpture and painting were just not enough for our needs and aspirations.

The critics and art writers of course hated us, WAAG projects were described as “ghetto” exhibitions and the artwork were labelled as “vagina-art” because there was quite a lot of works that had to do with the female body and the conditions of being a woman in Ireland at that time. The word “feminist” was used as a slur at the time, as was synonym of being a “lesbian” (used as a derogatory term). I like the fact that WAAG purposely choose the slur ‘WAGs’ 1 for their name’s acronym. It has the power shout of reclamation about it.

AM

You have to understand the kind of lived experience of feminism that we were engaged in in Ireland.  It wasn’t theoretical nor abstract for us.  We were living in a country where our body was (and still is) completely policed, from our birth to our death. The condition of women in Ireland was sickening, and we weren’t even aware of the whole picture...2 We were worth nothing, absolutely nothing in the eyes of the State, and that’s what galvanised many women to approach feminism / feminist groups or a more direct-action activism. That is why we were labelled as doing so-called “vagina-art”, that’s why our work was so visceral, angry, and outraged. We had finally a place to express ourselves and it felt like a “volcanic explosion” of feelings & aspirations that had been suppressed for too long.  

At the time of WAAG, we felt that some things were beginning to shift in Ireland (i.e. the ROI joined the European Union, the power of the Church started to crumble…) but still women’s bodies were constantly under pressure, under stress. Denial of reproductive rights, of contraception and divorce implemented by the State3 were deliberate acts of state violence against the female body, and we personally experienced this oppression daily. Of course, queer and trans rights were not even mentioned in society at the time. 

There was a huge sense of frustration and hopelessness among many women in the Island. Initiatives like WAAG gave many emerging artists like me the confidence and support to develop my ideas, think laterally, question established norms, and employ multi-faceted processes - as an artist, as a feminist and as an advocate for women’s / basic human rights. 

AM

It is true, it showed me the power of solidarity with peers, and confidence in the idea that another alternative is always possible. I was not an activist in early life but collaboration & solidarity were approaches to practice that I carried through into my later career, for example during my participation in the “Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment” or my recent collaboration with Rachel Fallon for “the Map” during The Magdalene Series at Rua Red in Dublin. Other artists in WAAG started important collaborations, for example Pauline and Louise for the work “Sounding the Depths”. Pauline and Louise also initiated a lecturer job-share in NCAD, which was quite an uncommon thing at the time. So, work practices were changed, influenced by different ways of thinking. Many people involved in NIWAG/WAAG went into education (as students or lecturer), so they carried out the ideas which were tested in NIWAG/WAAG: experimentation of contents and materials, non-hierarchical and collaborative approaches to art making, as well as an interest and involvement in activism.

AT

When I came to live in London, I felt quite isolated and my partner encouraged me to go to a céilí organised by the Irish Women’s Centre. There I met some of the women who were running a centre in Stoke Newington, set up to support the rights of Irish women living in the UK. Their work challenged social, economic, cultural discrimination and enabled me to better understand structural impacts of racism. In many ways this encounter was a watershed moment for my practice.

Apart from having attended a part-time print-making course at the School of Visual Arts in New York I had up until then no formal art education. However, building on the practice I had, and with the encouragement and support from one of the women at the Irish Women in Islington Group1 [IWIG] I applied to the Experimental Media Masters course at the Slade.

I ran art workshops for women at IWIG who were shy of formal education environments. This activity contributed to IWIG’s cultural activities and provided the impetus to reach out to other Irish women artists which ultimately led to the formation of the Irish Women Artists Group in 1986. The founder members were (as far as I can remember) Rosemarie McGoldrick, Rose Ann McGreevy, Frances Hegarty and Sherry Robinson. Rosie, I believe, had studied for her BA at Chelsea School of Art, Rose Ann taught there for many years and Fran ran the Fine Art course at Sheffield Hallam. Our group activities were centered around meetings to share information and gather of documentation of Irish Women artist’s work.

With support of IWIG we staged three events that gave visibility to Irish women artists: Prism 1 and II (1986) as part of Carraig Agus An Fharraige, a London wide festival celebrating Irish women’s culture. The Eye to Eye conference with the Women’s artists Slide Library at The Battersea Arts Centre (1986) and the group exhibition Off the Map at Chiesenhale Gallery (1987).

Whilst volunteering at IWIG I learned that The Women Artists Slide Artists Library were keen to develop an international resource for women’s art and attract wider membership from Ireland. I began to volunteer there. Eye to Eye evolved out of discussions with WASL and was supported and co-curated by Alanna O’Kelly, already a fellow at the Slade and highly respected Irish artist in Ireland who also had recognition in the UK.

Incidentally, these eyes [on the cover page of the printed programme and our Eye to Eye poster] are Alanna’s from a photograph I took. Our first thought for Eye to Eye had been to show as many slides as possible featuring works by Irish women artists for a UK audience. Later we expanded the event to include presentations and performances. Alanna encouraged many of her peers from Ireland, who held her in high esteem, to travel over to take part in the event. Participants included Anne Carlisle2, Geraldine O’Reilly; Cecily Brennan; Mary Duffy; Alanna O’Kelly; Aileen McKeown and Cummins.

I recall Pauline Cummins at the end of the Eye to Eye weekend when we were informally discussing the event saying she would like to organise something like IWAG in Ireland and indeed she did go on to successfully establish WWAG.4

IWAG came from the diaspora initially wanting to make links with Irish women artists in the UK and secondarily between women in Ireland and the UK. This was at a time when the GLC Leader Ken Livingston (1981–1986) was open to supporting minority communities. Artists and activists critically and actively engaged in addressing issues of difference were working hard to advance awareness of discrimination through their work. Unfortunately, things changed with Thatcher’s government. As I wrote then:

‘The project developed with greater confidence with encouragement and support of community based Irish Women in Islington Group which provided the imperative link with the Irish community. In addition, with the threat of abolition, the grant aid programme of the greater London council was halted, and the Women Artists Slide Library did not know if they were to receive any funds for this event until a few weeks before the actual thing happened. Fundraising then took place by IWIG which enabled the project to continue at that stage’ 5.

AT

It was the Irish Women’s Centre and the Irish Women in Islington Group who offered support for the formation of IWAG. Their support meant that we had the facilities, for example the use of a room access to a photocopier and the provision of other useful resources. Our first event Prism 1 and II was a small group exhibition showcased at the Festival of Irish Women’s Culture. I seem to recall there was very little time to organise things. All the galleries we approached were booked, but we were able to use a floor of the Women’s Resource Building in Featherstone Street, which although not a traditional exhibition venue, we managed to make work.

At our group meetings we showed slides of artworks, held discussions, for example about the conditions of second-generation Irishwomen, cultural displacement, and the relevance of exhibiting collectively. Fionna Barber [Art Historian and writer] was helpful in many ways not least in providing a critical art historical perspective.

AT

Yes, absolutely, Fionna wrote a key essay for the ‘Off the Map’ exhibition at Chiesenhale in 1987.

AT

The founders of course, who I have mentioned; Frances Hegarty a second-generation Irish woman, living in England, Roseanne McGreevey was also a highly regarded educationalist in the UK and Rosie McGoldrick who went on to run The BA Fine Art department until recently at London Met.

By taking part in projects, events and activities generated by IWIG, other artists made positive connections and contributions, such as Carole Key and Sherry Robinson.

‘Off the Map’ at Chiesenhale provided the platform for the group to speak to a wider audience at a high level and we hoped it would be a catalyst for many other initiatives. David Thorpe told me recently that exhibition was the best attended in his time as Chiesenhale Gallery director. The show made visible the contribution that Irish women artists were making to culture and education in the UK.

There were Irish women who had studied in the UK and stayed due to circumstance whilst some maintained a presence both in Ireland and in the UK. Where we ended up was conditioned according to financial and social conditions. On a personal level I have tried to maintain my relationship to Ireland, both North and South, and in the UK.

AT

Yes, there were reciprocal exchanges and invitations. IWAG was a relatively small-scale project that had a short life as it happened over a couple of years, and it didn’t have a longevity because of members’ various commitments such as work, life, family, and care responsibilities. But it was a significant catalyst. When it ended, we felt that the women involved would apply the experience in other contexts. In my case, because I began studying as mature student, I felt it necessary to focus entirely on my studies.

AT

That’s right. Rosie Mc Goldrick and Carole Key went on to study for their masters at Goldsmiths after the Off the Map exhibition. Many became significant figures in higher art education as mentioned.

AT

Perhaps those groups in Ireland would have emerged anyway but I think that for sure they had been encouraged by IWIG. We were very lucky to have the support of The Irish Women’s Centre and the Irish Women in Islington group, both of which had the experience of working with local authorities and understood what was at stake for Irish women in the UK. The Women Artists Slide Library provided an invaluable database and resource. They supported many women included in Eye to Eye but had a very wider remit.

AT

All publicity material gave equal visibility to the Irish Women in Islington Group and the Women’s Artist Slide Library but sadly the Slide Library felt they should have been foregrounded and suggested at the last minute, a stamp with their logo was to be added to the poster. We argued against this as it was important for IWIG to have equal visibility. I think the involvement of IWIG was a gift to the Slide Library, and believe at that time they may not have fully appreciated how fortunate they were to be working with such an organisation. Indeed, Paula Brown one of the WASL board members wrote a letter of support arguing against the logo stamp which we greatly appreciated.

AT

I think you have hit on an important issue. Enabled by our collective expertise we attempted to operate professionally. All outward facing publicity such as connections with media were designed to a high standard to counter any preconceptions that we were naively amateurish. Some community- based, grassroots, art groups and projects consciously adopt a DIY aesthetic as a politically critical gesture. Indeed, one of my current projects hmn does just that! However, back then it was important for us to avoid being judged or dismissed as “less than” established institutions even though we had far fewer resources. We wanted to ensure the artists connected to our project would be taken seriously.

AT

We had regular meetings at the Irish Women’s Centre, I think it was every month or so. We discussed work and planned upcoming projects.

AT

No, I don’t think we took minutes as such. We had to produce funding applications and reports which provide some formal record of our activities, such as the IWIG annual reports where there were accounts of ‘Prism’ and the ‘Eye to Eye’.

AT

No, IWAG was a collective, a loose collective of shared interests that primarily was set up to enable Irish women artists find some visibility here.

AT

Some of us were friends before the formation of IWIG, others became friends through our work together. Alanna O’Kelly, as I have mentioned, was already a good friend and certainly my friendship with her was key. I am not sure if Alanna knew Francis before the group formed or later, but they are close, as are Alanna and Pauline. After forming IWIG I became friendly with Rosie McGoldrick, Carole Key and Fionna Barber. I see friendships as an active “rhizomatic structure”.

AT

That is totally key. Our artistic practices were pushing at the edge of the tradition and of the canon that we were all expected to validate. It is interesting that quite a number of women that took part in IWIG related projects went on to hold significant posts in education. We were pioneering in many ways. Off the Map at Chisenhale had a parallel video screening programme that included Vivienne Dick, and Trish McAdam. Returning to your point about friendship, one of the people who photographed the exhibition was I think the writer, Cherry Smith. There were alliances and networks that would emerge much later. I think of how to this day Fionna Barber has a significant impact in the UK and Ireland. I seem to recall she was, when I first met her in London, at this beginning of her theoretical and art historical practice, which involved writing in depth about a lot of contemporary Irish women artists. Her friendship and scholarship across the board has meant a lot. Certainly, meeting her was extremely helpful to someone like me who didn’t have a formal art education. I listened to her eloquence around the efforts we were making to make change. She had a very clear understanding of what was going on at the time and was a key ally.

AT

Yeah, I guess it is one of these people that have this ability of putting people together… like a sort of “glue”, but also be able to understand what is happening in the moment that it is happening… I am looking forward to speaking with her soon.

Just a question about access to higher education - was it free at the time or did you have a scholarship, or do you have to pay to go to university?

AT

I got a full British Academy Grant. I was worried I might not stand a chance as I had had no formal education, but my prior experience was deemed equivalent to a BA. Susan Hiller who taught at the Slade was sympathetic to my untraditional background and encouraged me to apply and Alanna O’Kelly gave me invaluable help when preparing my application portfolio.

AT

I think you could say that Chiesenhale was even then a cool place to show, as you can see from their online archive. Incidentally, although not connected to IWIG, Kathy Prendergast, who is a very successful Irish artist has lived in the UK since her studies at the RCA, showed there the year before Off the Map. I didn’t know Kathy then, which illustrates that although our gathering of information about Irish women artists living and working in the UK was extensive, it was by no means comprehensive. Kathy is a good friend of Cecily Brennan, one of the speakers at Eye to Eye, but I can’t recall if Kathy she attended the event.

I think Chiesenhale showed mid-career and younger artists from the start including some who I think had studios there. It was a publicly funded venue, and the director and founder David Thorpe’s programme was very experimental. He included some diverse practices from artists who could be thought of as ‘othered’ and it was certainly a respected and an important context for our work.

AT

Yes I think perhaps that was so.

AT

I think there was a growing awareness of the marginalisation of minorities in the UK which was beginning to filter into the art scene. Meanwhile I don’t think there was enough space in Ireland for women to show and this was being challenged.

AT

You are right. I think that the experience of moving, of leaving where you are from deeply informs your thinking and makes you very aware of how you have to navigate an unfamiliar territory, having to find new signposts to be able to make your way around. There were artists such as Lubaina Himid who were working hard for visibility of black artists. (Incidentally Lubaina showed at Chiesenhale 1989 with Donald Rodney who I was at the Slade with). She was very encouraging to me personally and to many other women struggling for visibility. Her work helped galvanise me. There were other inspiring role models and organisations such as Four Corners and Camera Work who were shifting things in practice by creating positive environments. Reflecting on this now, I think that in the UK at the time, there was a context in which these initiatives could be very productive.

AT

Totally, there was racism. I remember a pub right opposite the Chisenhale Gallery that had a sign on the door that would have predated the recent conflict saying ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’. Systemic racism towards the Irish community was amplified by the political context. It was hard to navigate that.

AT

Some artists critique such racist and misogynist attitudes through work that directly, clearly and successfully challenges assumptions by explicitly employing and working with stereotypical imagery. Historical, political and social issues that emanate from my interest in structural mechanisms of power underpin my thinking and making but are not immediately apparent in what I produce. Indeed working with a paradigm of ‘the overlooked’ the challenge I have set myself is to create a language that addresses what it means to be othered, hidden and unheard.

AT

Yes, exactly, I remember Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith writing about my work saying I didn’t play the ‘green card’. My early work such as The Gap of Two Birds and Altered Tracks, have visual references to Ireland and are rooted in concerns addressing language and history but they hold back from explicit narratives that can be immediately read.

Within the group, each one of us had our own agenda within our practice, and there was a really strong sense of wanting to encourage each other in developing in whatever way seemed appropriate. There was no censorship but plenty of critical support.

AT

One of the first things that really shook me was how little people in the UK knew about Ireland. The level of misunderstanding and ignorance about what was going on in relation to Irish history was shocking.

AT

It made no difference whether you came from the North or the South here, once you spoke as far as people were concerned you were just from Ireland. I came from the North and a protestant background. People grappled with that especially when the conflict impacted on the mainland.

For some years I collaborated with John Seth, who is from Anglo-Indian background. Our discussions were often around our experiences regarding about what it was like to be living in one place whilst having two identities: British and Irish or British and Indian. Those discussions were very important and informative in my thinking. I think there was something about seeking alignment and finding a theoretical framework for one’s practice that made sense. Reading post-colonial studies, discovering Stuart Hall for example and reading feminist criticism were all key to developing an understanding that made sense. In terms of ‘identity’ I always felt that I had one toe on the edge of a raft. I was trying to haul the rest of me up with the fear that at any time I could get dragged back, and be defined only as a stranger and not being part of this place.

I have lived here well over thirty years, have taught in one of the biggest art schools, but no matter what I do, I still do not feel that I belong here, but then I don’t feel a at home anywhere anymore, so I think the edges of my understanding of personal identity, those boundaries that were certitudes and finite are completely porous. In my experience those boundaries are often contested and uncomfortable, but at the same time this struggle is productive and exciting. I don’t see the world in terms of the borders that I did when I first came here.

AT

Exactly. I also think that education plays a key role. Education, or the intellectual economy if you like, has been a lifeline for me. It is very interesting to see that during the pandemic many opportunities came up for people who couldn’t afford/access higher education, as there was plenty of free talks, symposiums and online course. This has been quite a good outcome from a horrible situation, and that is another example of ‘porosity’, another example of a border that has been breached. For those of us who were very ‘bordered’ in the early days, being able to get past the way you were viewed, or you were thought of, was a huge achievement. I also realise that in fact people may have been quite benign towards you although you had an uneasy sense that they weren’t.

I remember doing a talk at St. Martin’s many years ago when I first went there. It was for an art historians’ conference, and it was a talk based on my work The Gap of Two Birds, I was talking about

the mapping and naming of Irish placenames and all of this, and somebody from the public said something quite aggressive to me which sounded like “why are you harking back to this point in history?” I found this a very challenging question and I remember saying “Well, we have had eight hundred years of a problem, so you know, I am not going to deal with it all in one day”. So even if my experience in higher education was overall encouraging and supportive, you would occasionally come across blind spots.

AT

It certainly is.

AT

I was never part of consciousness raising groups. My partner was as a young feminist. She was a mother with two children and coming out as gay, consciousness raising groups saved her life basically, and helped her out of her marriage. That term means something very specific in terms of feminist history. One of the management committee reports of the Irish Women in Islington Group mentions that there is rarely acknowledgement of the fact that women make up the largest portion of the most vulnerable groups within society including those with social problems, mental health issues, single parents, single immigrant workers and those suffering from alcohol abuse, but nonetheless, there is often poor provision of support and help, like advice on abortion, contraception, employment opportunities and so on. The Irish Women in Islington Group was about supporting, for example, Irish lesbians and offering encouragement to Irish women wishing to organise and live autonomously, so that is a form of consciousness raising, but in a more practical way and was very direct action oriented.

It was about establishing and getting funding to make a real difference to women’s lives who were vulnerable, who were disenfranchised and who were suffering on a real, day to day level. That came as a reaction to systemic racism towards economic migrants, as well as huge issues like abortion provision for migrant women. Very often women would come to work in this country to be able to send money back home, so you cannot look at the work of artists without seeing it in the context of a broader social framework.

Another key issue that IWIG was trying to tackle was isolation, that is why it was really important to have group events, like swimming groups and art classes, and all of these women who may have felt shy and nervous about going to other groups would have felt that they were safer with people of the same accent and the same experience, so I think consciousness is a complicated term.

AT

It was, and looking at what we were doing then, we had moved on quite significantly. Also, in a way our direct-action approach was a precursor for a lot of what is happening today. I often reflect in relation to the work of feminist/queer struggles now that “We were in fact doing that then!” Much of what we did in those groups can be seen in relation to activism today.

AT

I think it is very important to underline that there was a divergence between some of the approaches of the Women’s Artists Slide Library and what we were doing at IWIG. I think there was movement in different directions. The Irish Women Action Group was a very small entity, working behind the scenes. It was quite niche and unknown, but its approach informed some of the collective artists’ and activists’ practices, whilst WASL had a broad remit and higher profile.

AT

Absolutely. Also, just to go back to something I might have said at the very beginning, for me being connected to these groups was the equivalent to having an intense education. I learnt so much that I didn’t previously understand about history and politics and being involved shifted my awareness. You would be hard pushed to find in traditional institutional organisations the criticality and rigor that voluntary organisations such as IWIG applied. The level and depth of intellectual understanding of what they were doing was extremely profound and so interesting now that I reflect upon it.

AT

I am sure there were. I know that within the Irish Women’s Centre and the Irish Women in Islington Group there were links, but I don’t know in detail. My relationship was very much with the people gravitating around the London Irish Women’s Centre and the Irish Women Artist Group.

AT

Although hard to quantify I think part of a legacy would be the sense of confidence that some women would have felt having had association with the group’s activities, the confidence to take your work into places that you might not have done before, and the confidence to speak on behalf of your colleagues and of others.

I imagine, it would depend on perception. I mentioned before, the experience in IWAG probably had an impact on Fionna’s thinking. IWAG certainty had this effect for me. It gave me the courage to go into higher education and not to be afraid to think about complex issues related with identity, which is something I would have struggled to make visible, so in many ways there is a massive legacy, but one that would remain at a meta-level.

AT

Although these initiatives such as IWAG were active for a very short period of time, and people didn’t necessarily end up working together I think, however modest, something positive did emerge from being acknowledged, heard and seen. We felt more confident to acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of Irish women artists both in UK and Ireland. Some friendships, networks and projects certainly grew from it.

Over the years, and with the understanding of how difficult it can be to push against unconscious and conscious bias in education and the art world in general, while teaching where I had a little agency, I sought to create opportunities for Irish artists.

And on the other hand, I was invited by the artist Monica Ross to give a lecture at Central Saint Martin, she had seen my performance Altered Tracks in Off the Map many years before. This is an example of how networks of support - despite inevitably dissipate and become less over time – are also continuously existing in new ways through friendship and solidarity.

I think younger artists and communities continue to find the voice and confidence to speak in ever more innovative ways about the trauma of being othered’. They have to share new life skills and understanding to survive in an alienated environment and yes, I think friendship it is key to survival within the art world, and beyond.

AT

I think there is a balancing act between personal need and external agendas. It is a constant challenge to act ethically. Our subjective reality is constantly in dialogue with the contexts we find ourselves in. We have to change and adapt to circumstances. Coming together, being responsive, reflexive, and critical to each situation is a challenge that we have to constantly recognise and deal with.

LW

In ‘87 I graduated from my MA in Belfast. Few months before that, I remember attending a talk in Dublin, this was part of an art project with huge and various slide shows of women’s art, organised by Pauline Cummins and other artists from WAAG. I was aware of WAAG’s activities, but I wasn’t directly involved in it while I was doing my MA in Belfast. There was a lot happening there in the North at the time. In the same period, I got invited to exhibit in the Douglas Hyde [Dublin], as part of the Irish Women Artists project which was formed to coincide with the International Women's Caucus - a big event held in Trinity College Dublin in 1987.

There were three exhibitions in three different galleries as part of this project, one of which was at the Douglas Hyde. I was invited to take part along with Alanna O’Kelly, Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, Pauline Cummins  and other women artists. As far as I can remember, before that show, there was very little or any interest around women artists’ practices.

In fact, women artists’ practice seemed to be almost completely written out of significant contemporary exhibiting. An example is the show on “Troubles inspired-art” (titled ‘Directions Out’) curated by Brian McAvera in 1987. McAvera excluded women artists from the show, with the excuse that there wasn’t any female artist working on that topic. Which wasn’t true, there were interesting artists like Deirdre O’Connell who was making these sentinel sculptural pieces and drawing works in Northern Ireland, and there were loads of other female artists doing artwork that was a response to the conflict, in fact it would have been really interesting to explore how female artistic positions around this subject. One example was Rita Duffy, as her iconography around the Troubles did direct depictions of women’s experience of the troubles in her work – yet she wasn’t included in the exhibition either.

Women approached issues surrounding women’s practices and experiences and seemed to utilise less ‘in your face’ war images and iconographies and maybe less ‘dramatic’ illustrative representations. I have found that, in comparison with their male colleagues, women’s work was often looking both at a feminist perspective while responding to the conflict.

The exhibition that McAvera had curated in the Douglas Hyde the year before, and for which he wrote a significant catalogue for, had a few women artists who were referenced in the text, but still none was included in the exhibition.

I remember Pauline and other women artists were very disappointed by this, and the show became a kind of a catalyst for many women-artists-led projects. Certainly, NIWAG would have come out of that disappointment and anger.

LW

The work that myself and other artists were making was critiquing - physically and politically – the positions for women in society and the effects of patriarchy - although we didn’t use the word patriarchy that much then - we were very much exploring this type of oppression towards women and women’s experience. There was also an interest towards re-claiming of histories going on at the time – re-imagining and re-casting myths, fairy tales and legends. It was a way to find ourselves, and making new ‘her-stories’, reshaping a past that had erased women’s stories and lives.

Fionna Barber, Alice Maher and I were briefly living in a house on Ormeau Road. Shortly after, Alice went to study in San Francisco with a Fulbright scholarship. Our MFA group put together an exhibition in 1986 in Belfast and I ran a touring exhibition of it between 86 and 87 - to Derry, Dublin and Cork.

Through this I worked in residencies and projects in Derry as a recent MA graduate. The time I spent in the city was very formative, and I got the chance to meet Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, both were working on projects run by the Orchard Gallery in Derry.

I was interested in travelling to the US, and I got a £200 bursary from the Alice Berger Hammerschlag Foundation to finance my trip that summer (1987). It was a great opportunity, the grant could be spent how I wanted, I just had to write a short report to tell them how I did spend the money.  I had this idea of doing presentations and exhibitions of contemporary Irish women artists’ work while travelling, so I asked the artists in WAAG and NIWAG to give me their slides before leaving Ireland… and that’s what I did, I was travelling around the States, being hosted in people’s houses and had exhibitions and various presentations of contemporary Irish women artists in America.

I managed to do an exhibition of Irish women artists in New York later in 1987 while staying at Leon Golub and Nancy Spero’s loft, and I organised another event in the Irish Art Centre in New York. On the back of that, I was invited to present the work at a women’s collective in San Francisco, and at the San Francisco Art University, the School of Art in Chicago and in other places… It was all organised through friends’ and artists’ connections – for example, I was in contact with Maggie Magee who was an Irish artist based in the States. I was trying to make the most of my 200 quid, and I was so interested to be there, as an artist and as a queer person. I got the chance to attend the first ever LGBTQI+ march in Washington (well it wouldn’t have the QI+ back then!). I remember hanging out with all these queers – including large gatherings of lesbians, and there was nothing like that happening in Ireland, so that was a very impactful experience for me, that march was the first time for instance that the AIDS quilts were being collected in one place…

LW

The experience of being in a crowd of queers, like a million queers from all over the States, coming from as far as Hawaii and the Yukon in Alaska, and the act of ceremonially unfolding each of the AIDS quilts, was really powerful for me and it really informed my feminist practice and thinking. It was quite an incredible experience to see the impact AIDS had made on the queer community, and this physical tradition of quilting becoming how the images of each represented a counted person, their life and death celebrated and documented, sharing in this massive grief and loss.  And then, hanging out with a load of likeminded people, a load of lesbians who were organising politically and culturally in America… We were used to feeling (and being) so illegal and so fugitive back in Ireland and it was so important for me, once in the US, to be hosted under feminist and queer flags. My understanding of feminist activism at the time included both lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, many different cultures all affected by homophobia, misogyny, poverty and racism, meeting people who were just focusing on the different pressing issues that connected for me within feminism - an inclusive feminism.

I felt a very strong connection with WAAG and NIWAG while doing my tour in America - although I couldn’t really say I was doing it just for these organisations, I was doing it primarily for myself, showing Irish women’s work as a way to get around and make connections.

Nancy and Leon gave me the chance to teach in Rutgers University, they were so generous and loving. I did meet both in Derry earlier in the year during the time they were researching for an exhibition in the Orchard Gallery, and they were keen to keep connections with local artists they met in Ireland. During my time in New York, I also ended up speaking on a film about Leon’s work, so those kinds of things were happening thanks to NIWAG and WAAG.

When we created NIWAG, our idea was to have an organised presence specifically for those artists based in Northern Ireland. At the time, the border was very policed, and the presence of this legal boundary of two jurisdictions of statehoods felt very real compared to now. I have always strategically and consciously refused “to see” the border, but obviously I would acknowledge the administrative controls, and how this translated in practice i.e., having different funding schemes and a different Arts Council of the North and South. The NIWAG organisation itself was quite informal, the only reason why NIWAG was constituted was because we were applying to Northern Ireland Arts Council to get fundings to develop our projects, so to be eligible to apply we needed to be constituted as an organisation that operated in Northern Ireland.

I wasn’t too keen or skilled at managing the admin aspect of NIWAG because of dyslexia and but I would have been on different boards and working with different organisations like ‘Women’s News’ and the ‘Lesbian Line’ which was part of Cara Friend, a NI gay helpline and also the organising of different events that surrounded the International Womens Day celebrations in Belfast. These events linked up a lot with the ‘troops out’ movement and centred on women political prisoners who had been strip-searched and the many human rights violations happening in the British prison services at the time. Many UK women came to Belfast to demonstrate their solidarity and many were lesbian activists.  Discussions made us more aware of more radical groups like ‘Wages for Housework’ activists and groups like the ‘Southall Black Sisters’ also. I was also quite involved in political activism; I would have been going often to political events. Living in Northern Ireland for me was a political experience too, which was linked with my previous awareness of activisms work in Cork: I was involved, for example in ‘The Women’s Place’ in the Quay Co-op – which doesn’t exist anymore - but it was a very strong space for women's political organisation. When in college in Cork there was a huge movement of student feminism, so I was learning about it too from past generations of artists and activists…

LW

Peers, it was mainly coming from my peers. Few exceptions that I remember were a visiting lecture by Alanna O’Kelly and being taught by Breda Lynch in Foundation year, she was a very supportive artist and tutor. But I felt that the most formative discussions around feminism and feminism in art were happening between peers - people like Aine O’Brien and Alice Maher for instance. There were also a few students who came to study in Cork from Germany for instance, and there was a real sense of opening Ireland into connections with Europe and into the UK. But I feel that my deeper understanding of feminism thinking and practice and its relationship with artmaking became more coherent when I moved to Belfast, being there allowed me access to what was going on in Britain. Since then, I didn’t really know a lot about British contemporary art, the resources in the library in Cork, especially around feminism, were very poor.

In Ireland, feminist ideas were coming from places like the Grapevine in Dublin (which later developed into ‘Project Arts Centre’), although I was never really involved with this organisation.  There was a lot of political activity and I suppose one of the pressing issues on the agenda was abortion rights, while queers’ rights were just beginning to tip around. When I came up to Belfast, I started to come out more coherently as a lesbian and understand local feminism within the framework of the occupation of Northern Ireland, the Troubles, the working-class struggles, the war. That experience was really an eye-opener for me, and while all this was ongoing, Mairead Farrell was killed in Gibraltar. I was living in the Lower Ormeau Road at that time, which was an interface area, and I suppose I started to see what was happening as a cause of imperialism, and it was progressively getting more cultured into political consciousness during my time living in Belfast.

LW

Yes, I wanted to spend time in Derry, and I got the opportunity to move there through an art residency there (through the Orchard Gallery). I organised an exhibition that I was able to tour to Cork and Temple Bar in Dublin. This was happening around the same time we were setting up NIWAG, and it was the time I got to know Pauline.

I remember really strongly one day there were a lot of us from WAAG and NIWAG on a train, and there were loads of chats – a lot of women were older than me, some just a bit older than me, others ten/twenty years older… and we were getting to know each other. There was a lot of women who were in more stable lives than me, but some of them were starting to question their lifestyle and life choices. Some of them might maybe have had kids young, they had gone to college earlier, some of them were artists and were re-examining their family lives, while others were unravelling partnerships with men or relooking at what they had signed up for, and as artists they were struggling to find their own way. It was like a different phase of consciousness raising, which had effects on a much deeper level… and I think that women were experiencing themselves as more than they had been in the seventies. I remember saying I was a lesbian in a few conversations, and that seemed to have an impact on some in the group. I was in my very early twenties and so some of the women were in their thirties and forties, most of them weren’t based in Dublin city and were coming from rural areas where they might not have met lesbians before… some people were like ‘oh my God, she said it out loud, and she is happy out like’ and that was significant, I was full of the joys, I was all excited about being queer, and I guess I had decided it wasn’t a burden to carry anymore and I was happy to be out. I was having a great time!

LW

The ‘Women’s News’ was the project I was mostly involved in, and I did little sketches and illustrations, but it was great to play a little in the only women-led Northern Ireland magazine, which again was coming out of Belfast and that was organised as a collective.  

I was approached a few years ago by the ‘Reclaim the Night’ group, they wanted to reproduce a drawing I made for NW magazine in the late 80s, but since they had such a low-quality image to begin with, I decided to draw a new one and I updated it, making it more diverse and inclusive… I am laughing because it is not exactly my greatest work or anything like that, but those were the kind of things I was doing, and I found it very enjoyable. I was doing all sorts, and it wasn’t even considered activism.

LW

Yes, I found Women’s News at a time where I really wanted to be involved and it led to all sorts of moving into the queer and feminist community. I remember being at meetings all over the place! …  I was also involved in ‘Lesbian Lines’ - which evolved from Cara-Friend – which was providing a service exclusively for queer women.

One of the things about Northern Ireland is that back then it was easier to get funding for community projects than it was in the South. I remember that the Lesbian Line Group in Belfast did a fundraising pitch for a project in Cork, in order to undertake training with the ‘Lesbian Line’ groups there, including the Galway and Dublin lesbian lines. Since we had a unique programme in the North where we had received helpline training, and there weren’t yet funding for these organisations in the south as such, to organise to travel to connect to share our experiences of our training in the South. We got the funding from ‘Co-Operation North’ to run a Lesbian Lines Conference and were able to use minibuses from the University of Ulster to go down to Cork to meet in the Quay Co-op, do training sessions with the women working there and to link up with and create connections with ‘Lesbian Lines’. It was very impactful, and beneficial for us since there were lots of women in the North going down for these two events and it was such a significant moment for making friends and connections.

I have a photo of us all heading down… and there was also a group of women would go down to the Cork Women’s Fun Weekend. We were like a ‘travelling band’, always looking for connections because there wasn’t enough going on in the North if you were a lesbian and/or a feminist. And it’s important to mention that my experience at the time was of a real mix of lesbian, bisexual, and straight women, we would go off to events all together, because we were ‘forced’ to travel for an effective social life, or travelling for a wider life.

LW

NIWAG came to a natural conclusion around early 1990s, when I eventually moved from NI to South, I was still travelling to Belfast for arts projects – especially my public sculpture project ‘Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker’, the process of which started in 1988 and was completed in 1991. At the same time, Fionna - whom I used to share a house with - moved to England and others had other commitments, like Anne Carlisle that was one of the founders of CIRCA, moved to Wales. We all moved on into to other opportunities, and the organising energy of NIWAG was very much that of a short-lived organisation. On the other side, WAAG really held a space partly because of Pauline and Breda Mooney, which were both able to work voluntarily, and they invested their time.

For us in NIWAG, it was about taking agency and running with it. We wanted to show how many women artists were living and working in the North.  

We organised various events, featuring important artists like Anne Tallentire. One of the most distinctive events was the exhibition Identities, this show took place in the ARE gallery on Lombard Street. At the time I just returned from the slide talk that I had done all over America and quickly made a piece of work for this opportunity.

The people in ARE allowed me work in the Gallery overnight, so I worked for several nights there and I had music on really loud… and I remember that the RUC knocked at the door, because it was still at the time the City Centre was locked down in the evenings… I was clattering away and carving, banging things, and the RUC were ringing the key holders outside asking ‘what is going on up there?’, and all they found out was that I was making sculpture in the middle of town at about one o’clock in the morning on a weekend, and that was something completely unknown to them, and of concern.

Living in Belfast in the late 80s meant you were still being searched for going into the town, the conflict was very much part of the everyday life. While living in the Lower Ormeau with Fionna we were there when a neighbour’s son was shot in the street by somebody on a motorbike, it all played out in front of the neighbour’s house, in the middle of the day. Both Fionna and I had stomach upset for days afterwards, the two of us were in shock because it was so close and we heard it all, the shots, the screech of the motorbike’s brakes on the street stayed with us for weeks after.

I also attended Mairead Farrell’s funeral, when Michael Stone started throwing grenades…. And I went to that funeral because Mairead Farrell was a feminist working in grassroots women’s community groups, I didn’t know her well, she wasn’t somebody I was friends with, but I felt much solidarity towards her, especially after hearing was killed in Gibraltar. I felt that the way the British Government PR’d those events was shocking, and it brought me into a real experience of knowing how badly skewed things like this were reported… I was there for Michael Stone's grenade attacks on the crowds of mourners - how people were trying to protect one another. And then seeing first-hand again how things progressed that other day (the funerals - where plain clothes British soldiers loitering in cars nearby, who were then killed - executed really, in awful circumstances - but the context of the community of mourners being driven into by a car with armed men inside - were fully altered and recast by the media’s reporting in the UK), in the news and how everything turned out, I realised how the media manipulated the facts and regrafted whole other stories onto it… This was a very catalytic moment for me as an activist, and it change my awareness around power and especially around the media’s power to transform information. Also, the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Stalker enquiry stuff was being repressed by the state.

Earlier and again around this time, I went to Greenham Common as (Irish artist Alanna O’Kelly responded to these gatherings of women activating for de-militarisation at the peace camps there), I had some connections there. This was part of the feminist lesbian experience of that phase of the late 1980s, all of us involved were connecting to different women-centred activisms, but there was also a strong sense of connection between all our struggles. Women were coming together, the marginalised were coming together, and many of the marginalised were women, were queer… as activists, we were trying to work out class issues, national politics, imperialism, and colonialism - racism seemed like part of all these problematic issues of imperialist abuse of power and control… all in Northern Ireland.

We were mainly white feminists/lesbians organising around the cultural and social dynamics of artistic representation, sexism, occupation, sectarianism and the conflict.

I was also aware of my position as different from that of a Northern Irish woman, I was a newcomer arrived from the south coast of Ireland with very particular blind spots around what the North was and what it meant to me. Living in Northern Ireland, made me experience the Nationalist identity and a Protestant working-class perspective too. As somebody from the South of Ireland, I had never really inhabited a space where Protestants were poor, for example, Protestants were landlords and landowner in the village I was from - they were considered “our gentry” if you like.  Being to Northern Ireland and knowing areas such as Sandy Row and seeing very poor Protestants was quite a shock, because I always saw Protestants as upper class, university goers. In comparison with the rest of the island, Northern Ireland was another planet, and it was so fundamental for me learning about it historically, culturally and as a feminist and then becoming lesbian more fully there.

LW

Yeah, and I think that talking about an intersectional feminism approach makes sense here.

I felt that there was this real thing in Ireland where your lesbian identity would overtake everything, and it was ultimately why you wouldn’t come out as lesbian in the art world because your work would only be seen with that specific lens. There was the ‘lesbian artist lens’ and then there was the ‘woman artist lens’ and then anything you were talking about in your practice was seen through both of those tinted glasses.

What was very strong about Pauline Cummins and the other artists in WAAG is that they were starting culture where being a woman artist was the norm, that you would just go like ‘yeah, we are all here, there is so much here, it is just that we have not been let in, or we have allowed ourselves to be marginalised’. I would have put thousands of women artists in that Brian McAvera show, there were so many women making work.

Women were so underrepresented. In art schools the teaching was mostly led by men, who often used their position of power to take the advantage of young female students (and there was no #metoo stuff going on!). And for many young women the experience of being in the art school was quite negative, there was a constant, frustrating feeling of being pushed to the side and being dismissed professionally.

During my time in Belfast, those issue started to be finally talked about in much more coherent ways, suddenly we were all saying, ‘sure we have all, I have done this, I have done that, I have done that, I am this, I am that and yet still I can’t get the work seen as it should be seen’. This space that we were making for ourselves was being opened by women in WAAG and NIWAG.  

Despite being the first organisation on the island of that kind, NIWAG was definitely much more provisional than WAAG and it had a shorter life, it had less orthodoxy I think, we were doing more pop-up stuff… Northern Ireland at the time seemed to be a ‘sedate’ place for art, because of the Troubles going on, and it was a quite a statement to have a group like ours - where you have me, Fionna being a Protestant Northern Irish woman, and other both Southern Irish and Northern Irish artists.

LW

… yeah, and then if it wasn’t ‘Troubles art’, you needed to make things ‘that match the sofa’ – so to speak, and you felt that the only identity was represented commercially was the Protestant one ...or a sort of contemporary art-making that eschew the political, societal context to focus on saleable art objects. I think that in Northern Ireland there was a market for posh, beautiful things that could be sold in commercial galleries.

Talking about commercial galleries, it is worth to remember the Fenderesky Gallery programmed a women’s show in 1993 – which was quite ahead of time for a commercial gallery.

Pandora’s Box – a British publication initiated in 1984 - was significant for a lot of women artists in Ireland - it certainly influenced me, giving me examples of women making exhibitions for each other.

I also remember me, Alice (Maher) and Fionna (Barber) doing some direct action in the streets. We noticed a series of billboards which depicted very offensive and misogynistic representation of women for a Brut advert (an aftershave). There was this model – a 1950s-like lady showing a tight Santa dress and wrapped and exposed like a present, with the slogan saying ‘Brut, the perfect present’ - it must have been Christmas 1987 or ’88 - so we went out and we sprayed on them ‘brute force and ignorance’ and other feminist slogans, inspired by Jo Spence’s work… I think somebody wrote about it in ‘CIRCA’.

Other influential work I can recall was the 1980 show in ICA, ‘Women’s images of men’ – which included work of Helen Chadwick, that later came to Derry for the WAAG / NIWAG conference in June 1988.  The amazing Helen Chadwick was one of the keynote speakers at the conference and she was incredibly generous and wonderful, so I feel like she was a very important person in that series of events.

LW

Not really, I wouldn’t be sure… I was not an organiser of the conference, I just turned up! They were very political and more oriented to documentary making and direct narrative action rather than visual arts projects based in galleries. They were film makers, documentary photographers, working in the community and there was not a big overlap with us as women artists - at least, that’s my recollection. The art world at the time might have been still perceived as maybe not central to their narratives and engagements.

LW

A formative moment for me was the commission of the show in the then Kilmainham Gaol ‘In a State’ in 1991, the 75th anniversary of the [Easter] Rising. For this occasion, I was trying to make a work that talked about the border, but at the same time was dealing with female representation and talking about Ireland from a queer perspective. Looking at it now, it is very binary: two photographic lightbox images of a pair of men kissing, and a pair of women kissing and then the snakes on the ground.  But for me it was a very significant work, and it instigated conversations on Irish identity critically, and as an artist it was very important to explore Irish identity from a queer perspective… particularly in relation to notions of statehood, exclusion and the idea of European overlays to citizenship - and Dublin being a European City of Culture (while we still used a British law to criminalise homosexuals in Ireland).

LW

It felt like that, and with that show (curated by Jobst Graeves for the Project Arts Centre) in particular, things seemed to change in terms of inclusion, there was now an awareness - a feeling that you couldn’t make a show without having women included, and that’s something that started to happen really after the NIWAG/WAAG work, taking up this space that was precluded to us.

In 1987 WAAG organised a slideshow of Irish women artists’ work - A kind of a pop-up event held in the Project Arts Centre, it occurred in conjunction with the International Women’s Caucus, which that year was hosted by Trinity College in Dublin. It was a huge success and a massive lightbulb moment. There was a pile of international activist and academic women that poured into Dublin, all there to examine and share women’s cultural and creative agency, so seeing the WAAG stuff (and the other exhibitions celebrating women’s contemporary and historical art practices) that was a big push-up because of the connections made that these artists and academics wouldn’t have made otherwise.  I directly experienced that when I went to America, and people were so generous in giving me opportunities, there was a real sense of sharing culturally - women’s culture and queer culture and just supporting this push-up of underrepresented (and underfunded) Irish women artists.

LW

Pauline and Breda, along with other people, produced the exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which was WAAG's biggest project to date. It was an important moment of recognition, in the sense that WAAG was able to grab the method of institutional culture… Pauline has always been very strategic and clear about presenting herself in the centre and appropriating or spotlighting the mechanisms of the establishment. When we were doing ‘Sounding the Depths’, she said that she wanted the work to be collected, and I am going ‘What, go away out of that’, but she was really focused on it being important for the work we were making ‘I really want this to happen, this is the ground we deserve to hold, we need to be collected, if you are not collected you don’t exist in history’. Pauline’s activism was very much about grabbing the centre stage, grabbing the big museums, taking that space, and occupying it to show everybody the broad depth of women’s work – in order to make it impossible for people to say there were no women artists around to be invited to take part in any exhibitions.

Even bringing big names of feminist art like the Guerrilla Girls to the IMMA was really strategic, and it was definitely a remarkable moment for all of us.

Even though that kind of ambition was something that I wasn’t personally interested in, (I think that was my coping strategy and a reaction to feeling marginalised - and then thumbing your nose at it, surviving to thrive outside) but I could see the value of it. WAAG encompassed artists that were quite well established and that were able to make the most of their position of privilege strategically.

LW

NIWAG operated in the very sectarian, buttoned-down culture in Northern Ireland at the time.  It was a very oppressed environment that pushed a lot of people to move, to go to England or somewhere else - the people from NI that keep staying there were economically pushed towards making a certain kind of art, to keep the market going. Although there was a lot of activism, and pub discussion - ultimately folk seemed to feel very responsible to revert to creating a family stability, or needed to get secure and professional earning would kick in (more, it seemed, than in other places in Ireland I have had experiences of living in). The queers were kept out of these opportunities, so it wasn’t an option. The trauma of the Troubles seemed to affect and inform the need to couple up and get a nest sorted… now this is obviously my interpretation from my time within small pockets of communities - but it seemed to be a thing…

I think a lot of Protestant people who were critical and thinking through things ended up feeling they had to go, and left Northern Ireland because it was very hard to be inclusive or radical as a Protestant in Northern Ireland, and keep your loved ones alongside… Especially if you came from a very traditional or working class Protestant background, it would have been very traitorous and very difficult and if you didn’t subscribe to such a beleaguered identity, informed by sectarian politics - you could be seen as being ‘un-loyal’. In my personal perception, there was more slippage allowed in being a Catholic or a republican informed by socialist nationalism. So, if you were a queer or an artist, or a transgressive person who came from the Ulster Protestant tradition, it might be that you needed to move out of NI.

There were of course the people who stayed on - to organise, work and try to make changes from inside, but that was often a very difficult thing to do.

It was great to had the chance to go to San Francisco for the Irish Women conference in ‘86, Ailbhe Smyth was there and we showed some work and made an exhibition… Nell McCafferty and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill were also involved. Alice was there too since she got Fulbright scholarship just after the MA. Ailbhe would have been involved in WAAG previously and kept in contact with the projects.

I would say that NIWAG was definitely more informal, working not as orthodoxly – but in a funny way. This still allowed us to get some fundings to run projects that we cared about.

WAAG developed a deep institutional and structural methodology, and it was really inspirational. Regardless of the different structure and capacity, both groups had the strong drive of making things moving towards equality and celebrating the important work that women were producing.

LW

We were all working in each other’s kitchens or living rooms or bedrooms… . 

I think also happening around the same time was the Irish women’s camp and other connections where queer women were crossing the border to be together and to make connections which for me developed a very strong and diverse community of lesbian-based (but not exclusively) cross border Irish culture, as I previously mentioned.

The dual experience of working and living both in Derry and Belfast and in the South, pushed me to try to ignore the border. Of course, I understand that the different cultures, the different jurisdictions, the different organisational politics – there is Brexit now - but my strategy has always been that I refuse to give attention to the actual border itself, seeing Ireland as an island, and as a place that I am from and that I have lived in across the island. There is a part of me that is resolutely unwilling to separate my country of origin into North and South – and that doesn’t deny other cultures within those places, (or tries not to anyway!) in terms of Protestantism or Ulster identification, or people’s other many identities. I felt that was a strong thing to do during my life to just not recognise it. I know that there are problems with that position, but I don’t want to give it more power, I just don’t want that external dividing part to lodge in my consciousness - if that makes sense. We are all part of one island, and I don’t want to oppress anyone with my identity. I am also aware that I occupy a privileged position that allowed me – during my life – to relocate to different parts – North and South of Ireland. But it is maybe it is very different for a Northerner to come ‘down South’ though. I think it might feel always as a bit othered and the trauma of the conflict is almost irrelevant, papered over or invisible down south.

LW

I don’t know Anne Tallentire very well, but I remember that she was a very productive organiser, and educator along being an artist.

Another important organiser involved in NIWAG was Anne Carlisle, at the time she was already involved in CIRCA and ARE and Catherine McWilliams. Claire Hackett was another important figure, who then went on to work in the Falls Community Council. Claire’s practice was very much collecting oral histories from the Troubles, she was also working as Arts Administrator in ARE in the 80s and she was involved in other collectives such as ‘Belfast Exposed’.

So, it is very important to acknowledge the collective-led ecosystem in Belfast – ARE, CIRCA, and the many different women’s organisations were very key.

Finally, Fionna Barber was another very important figure. Since she was trained as a curator and as an art historian, Fionna had a real strong capacity for holding space, creating space for women in a complete vacuum, while having a clear perspective on what feminist production would look like. She had a sense on ‘how her-story is made’ as a counterpart to history.  

LW

The most important legacy was visibility – and this goes back with what I was saying about queer identity, we were trying to just be visible actually, it was really important to list and demonstrate that women’s work existed and it was as high a calibre as their male counterpart, and why the reason there were no women artists visible was because nobody had tried to make them visible, so we had to do that to ourselves and for ourselves. It was a real self-organising energy, and it created an invaluable precedent that could then be referenced.

Standing up to be visible and counted was strategically important for women and queers, for women and people in the UK and in the US, it was also a race issue, this wasn’t so prevalent in the island of Ireland because most of the population was still very white. Nonetheless, we had here a real class issue, where there was a real lack of women from working class background getting access to the arts. On another side, lesbian women were feeling like they couldn’t show themselves because they would be marginalised - and worse - as sometimes the penalties for stepping outside of ‘your allocated lane’ as a woman in Ireland – especially via a ‘deviant sexuality’ – this rejection, controls and the punishments for ‘getting above yourself’ could be very painful and terrifying.

There was still plenty to be sticky about, but visibility was the big energy we were activated by, making it impossible to ignore us again, making it impossible to say we didn’t exist and to try and show the quality and the calibre and the engagement that was contemporary, that was critical, and it was loud.

Exhibitions and events including women started to take place, and it was great to see women grabbing space and looking at a catalogue and saying ‘look, this happened and isn’t that great’. I remember the ICA showing ‘Women and Pandora’s Box’ and ‘About Time’, talking about women and performance, these were really important moments, they weren’t still in the mainstream but we were starting grabbing things to bring them into the centre, wanting to be that centre, a centre - either because we were coming from outside or trying to be radical and trying to open up spaces outside the establishment, in our own terms - dealing and opening up with issues and experiences that affected half the population.

LW

Absolutely, and bear in mind that at the time there weren’t many safe spaces.  I feel quite established now, I have been working in art college for long time and I feel like I have outed enough about being queer, but at that time I felt quite hopeless – there was no opportunities, little funding…

And it was just because some women that were occupying a more privileged position put all the hard work in to make things more accessible, it was just through consistent hard work and strategic organisation that they were able to keep doors open, the gap was held open by literally the sore feet of these women, keeping their feet in that door - and they were able to do it because they were the ones that could afford to do that – keeping that door open for those who could not do it themselves.

The provisional space that the likes of WAAG and NIWAG held was so very important, and I remember specifically Pauline Cummins and Breeda Mooney for WAAG being phenomenal organisers that put a massive amount of work in the organisation.  And there were also others very active, for example Patricia Hurl, Terry Rudden, and many others.

This also can have effects on these artists’ practice, and when women did a lot of organising sometimes this is affecting their own creative space - so that is a hard one when speaking about self-organised, volunteer-led working, you are giving over your time with kids and partners and your activism and then a lot of people don’t get the space to develop their own practice. It is worth mentioning that there is a lot of costs in terms of the energy and time that somebody dedicates to such initiatives, which is usually under-recognized.

Today’s legacy is hard to quantify… some of these archives are currently held in NCAD [NIVAL], so hopefully that will inform and inspire young artists… I think these archival materials still holds that energy towards making change that was fuelling of WAAG and NIWAG… somebody might take it up again, years later, and there might not be a lot to pick up, but there is a foundation there, to start something. As well as the research you are developing, which will hopefully get more people interested in the women-led collectives scholarship.

FB

I am just trying to remember the sequence of events… I need to backtrack a little bit, starting from my studies. I had been studying in England from the late seventies to 1985, in the same year I came back to Northern Ireland. At that point, I had been working on a PhD for the last few years, but I felt wasn’t going anywhere, so I came back to Northern Ireland to make a new start.

While in England, I was based in Leeds, and I was attending a hugely influential postgraduate course - the MA in the Social History of Art – which was taught by Griselda Pollock, John Taig and Tim Clarke. I had the privilege of being taught by Griselda, who at the time was working on the final draft of the seminal text ‘Old Mistresses’. Every week we had a lecture by her, which then transformed the notes into a chapter of ‘Old Mistresses’.  Looking back, I am realising what an amazing experience that was.

I was fortunate to be working and studying in an environment where feminist politics and feminist art politics were very visible, and the possibility of a feminist art-activism linked to an active, self-conscious feminist politics, embedded in real life experience.  This way of working and thinking crystalised through my early involvement with the ‘Pavilion Women’s Photographic Gallery’, which was such an important feminist-led initiative in North Leeds. The Pavilion was one of the first (if not the first) gallery of its kind in the UK, it run entirely by women, it certainly was the first Photographic Gallery to do that. I was involved in the organisation very soon after it opened.

All these experiences – the master under the guidance of Griselda and the work with Pavilion - had been my consciousness, and then when I came back to Northern Ireland, I quickly discovered that there was nothing like that going on in Belfast. It was bit of a shock at the first sight, I don’t know what I did expect but certainly it wasn’t there at that time. The idea of bringing my feminist experience in Belfast was always in the back of my mind, and that’s where the idea of events like the discussion during ‘Women on Women’ Exhibition in 1986 came from. This project was initiated and curated by the Fenderesky Gallery, which at the time was based at the bottom of the Malone Road. There were six invited artists: Vivienne Burnside, Anne Carlisle, Rita Duffy, Phyllis Mahon, Mary McGowan and Una Walker. As part of the event, I had the idea of chairing a discussion around the work and issues facing women artists in NI linked to the exhibitions.  I was beginning to make inquiries about how I could write and publish while living in NI, I had already started publishing I was in Leeds, and then I found out about CIRCA – an all-Ireland art critic magazine initiated in Belfast 1981. I can’t remember what was the first thing that I wrote for CIRCA, but it was probably a feminist review of some kind… As a contributor for CIRCA, I got to know Joan Fowler, with whom I develop the idea of a book about Irish women artists, which was going to be published by Attic Press. This will give you some coordinates about where my consciousness was at, and what I was doing at the time. I remember we were having a lot of informal discussions around feminism thinking and sharing a flat with Louise and Alice certainly meant that there was a lot of talk about feminist art going. It was a great experience for me, an emerging art historian, living with them when they were making things and being involved in various projects. I really had the chance to witness their process of decision making.

Another catalyst for the formation of NIWAG was the ‘infamous’ ‘Directions Out’ exhibition, curated by Brian McAvera, where women artists were completely written off. Many were very angered by this deliberate exclusion, and that is something that made the whole project more urgent. There was a lot being said about feminism within the context of the arts behind closed doors, but I think that the big “public” step really came after the first WAAG meeting in Clonmel.

FB

That is right. Louise, Una Walker and I went to Clonmel to take part in it. Before meeting you this morning, I came across to copy of an article I wrote about the event, it was basically a report on the meeting that printed on ‘Women’s News’. Women’s News was a feminist publication running out of Belfast in the 1980s, Louise was more involved in the group as I was (she was an occasional contributor and illustrator). The report I wrote is quite detailed as an account of what happened at the meeting and the decisions that were taken.  One of the points of action was that we needed a specific group in the North that was going to be as public facing as WAAG was intended to be. At that time NIWAG began to constitute itself and begin acting publicly as a women artists’ advocacy group.

We also had a meeting in Belfast that took part before the meeting in Clonmel, and during that meeting we planning to set up a Women’s Artists Support Group and to discuss about some of the issues that were facing women artists in NI. We also organised a WEA’s day-school, which ran in May, which was focused on work by women’s artists. This is from the event invitation leaflet: “During the day the artists Vivienne [Burnside] and Annalise [Smith] will be discussing their current work which includes the importance of images of women, and Fionna will be using slides to illustrate a talk on ‘Images of Women [Artists] in Ireland’”. This event was very much about raising consciousness and visibility around women artists. I had done a lot of work with the WEA while in Leeds, the organisation there was very active and I remember teaching a course on feminist art history called ‘Women Visible, Women Invisible’. This was an outreach event co-run with the Pavilion and was a widespread attempt to raise awareness about women artists, in contemporary terms and placing them in an historical framework. Again, I suppose I wanted to do something similar in Belfast, so I initiated this day-school…

FB

Yes, there was the scope of running an outreach programme, although our capacity was limited.

FB

‘Women’s News’ was a feminist group, as far as I know there weren’t artists as part of the editorial team, however Louise and others may have been involved as contributors, for instance designing covers for them. But the group was separate from what was going on in women’s art, even though art (art exhibitions, call outs etc.) were frequently mentioned in the magazine, the collective had more to do with feminist politics and grassroot activism. At that time, my recollection is that the magazine was printed and distributed in ‘Just Books’, which was the alternative bookshop in Winetavern Street.

FB

When I was writing my article for ‘Women’s News’, I was aware that there wasn’t a strong connection between our nascent women’s art group and other feminist groups in the city.  I think it had to do with the nature of collective feminist politics in Northern Ireland, and certainly in Belfast at that time. So much of the feminism organising had to do with real and urgent social issues, for example poverty, childcare, and lesbian identities… and all of this was happening with a very difficult context, not to mention of course the elephant in the room - the conflict - which was ongoing, and it was a very divisive topic within feminist circles. There were a lot of key unresolved issues; and women’s art was just at the periphery of that. Some women were very suspicious of women artists claiming to be feminists, I think they thought art was in a kind of “airy-fairy” world, not particularly connected to the everyday struggle.

FB

That’s interesting to hear that there was a stark separation between artists’ advocacy and feminist activists. It seems to me that activists and artists had a lot in common, for example, in NIWAG many artists were from working-class backgrounds, and had experienced the same issues of around childcare, poverty or queer liberation – which were topics frequently discussed in feminist magazines such as ‘Women’s News’ or ‘Women’s Actions’. Several artists in NIWAG were also activists themselves.

FB

That is true, and that is why I decided to write the article for ‘Women’s News’. I suppose I had this idealistic hope of trying to bridge that gap in some ways, it is not as if one article is going to do it, but I wanted to make visible this area of feminist activity that wasn’t being acknowledged. I also wanted to try to raise support and awareness about the fact that there was a nascent group of women artists in the North, that was going to organise public events and was attempting to be visible in the wider feminist community.

FB

Yeah, I mostly agree. I think that most critics were reluctant to consider experimental practices because of the canonical status of painting and expressionism at that time. The fact that so many women were doing challenging work - through the experimentation of different kinds of media – directly relates with feminist debates around art practice in the early eighties and the discourse around women of representation in art. I feel thought that this was very much more relevant in England, for some women it was quite difficult to pursue traditional artforms there. I remember the painter Margaret Harrison telling me about a conversation she had with Griselda Pollock, where Griselda told her that she couldn’t paint the female figure anymore. As a result, Margaret did a whole series of paintings about women’s bodies. My experience of Ireland was different, there were many women artists such as Alice Maher that were also painters, so you didn’t have that kind of division between a “feminist-informed art making” and conventional media of expression.

FB

Your position as a critic who experienced both the Irish and UK art-scene was key in understanding the complex correlations between the two islands. During 1987, both NIWAG and WAAG were established, and you were commissioned to write a piece on ‘Off the Map’ catalogue, the exhibition that the Irish Women Artists Group organised in the Chiesenhale Gallery in London.

FB

Anne Tallentire asked me to write this piece for the catalogue. I really enjoyed doing that - I suppose it really reflected what was in my mind at the time. Having just come back to Ireland from England, I had experienced a like-minded way of thinking around identity and feminism while I was abroad. What artists were reflecting on, through their work, was quite familiar to me. It was about that time that I started thinking about diasporic identity in relation to feminism, which were issues that were being raised by ‘Off the Map’. The women who were involved in the show were also very involved in different types of activism… you had people like Alanna who was very involved with Greenham Common, and the intersection between women’s anti-nuclear politics, peace movement, feminist art politics and Irish identity. All these threads intersect in a particular poignant way in Alanna’s work ‘Chant down Greenham’ (1984). I recently curated ‘Elliptical Affinities’ (2019-2020), an exhibition with Aoibhe Ruane at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, where we included Alanna’s work ‘Chant down Greenham’ to show how significant themes such as Irish politics, the representation of female body in the 80s, could meet wider global struggles, such as the anti-nuclear movement.  Fran Hegarty, who worked in Sheffield, was another member of the IWAG. The piece that she showed in ‘Off the Map’ was very much about American military activity and the presence of fighter bombers over the North of England, overlayed with reference to the land and the bog, and a sort of “suffusion” of Irish identity with a very real kind of political reality in England at that point. And then, in the same show, you had somebody like Anne [Tallentire], whose work has always been much more conceptual and encoded, but at the same time very much concerned with identity, as far as I see it, but touching a deeper level.

It is also relevant to mention the infrastructure that were present at the time in which this group formed. The Irish Women’s Artist Group in London emerged in the 80s as part of a whole series of initiatives that were being promoted by the Greater London Council, led by Ken Livingstone. Through the Council, Livingston widely promoted culture and diversity.  It was a very supportive environment, and there was funding available for different groups to explore aspects of diversity that linked into issues around race and underrepresented or marginalised experience. Anne was somebody that has been always clear about the precedent of black artists and the influence of black artists self-organising, and the strategies to make themselves visible - their methods of organising and collaborating was source inspiration for Irish Women Artists to come together and do something similar. So, it is important to remember that the IWAG came out of that very specific context, which allowed certain debates and practices to flourish, quite an ‘ideal’ scenario in comparison with what is going on in Ireland at the time.

FB

I think in more general terms we were dealing with two different arts councils and two different funding structures, one being in the North and one in the South.

FB

Being predominantly based in Belfast, we were working in a very specific political context, although this was never something that was specifically discussed within the women-led artists’ circles. There was a mutual, unsaid understanding that ours was a space where you left the so-called ‘politics’ at the door. That was also appliable to the Art College which was explicitly intended as a kind of a safe space (or haven?) completely detached with what was going on up the road.  It was very idealistic and the same time very problematic because the experiences that so many students were having was removed from the ongoing conflict, and there was a clear sense that certain things could not be discussed. It is interesting that there where these little cocoons or bubbles that were operating across Northern Ireland for all kinds of reasons…

FB

I would agree with that. The sense I have got is that there was a network of many different feminist-led groups, each of them with different kinds of agendas, and aligned with certain politics (i.e., republican feminists, socialist women’s group, feminists affiliated with trade unions, anarchists’ groups, lesbian groups etc…). This multiplicity of feminisms might have made things complicated because there wasn’t just one feminist movement, or one feminist take on the current political situation. In this regard, I remember I was asked to speak at the WAAG Symposium in Derry, and I decided to read a slightly different version of an article I had just published in CIRCA. There was one sentence, which I did edit specifically for the Symposium, where I am talking about all the different things you have to negotiate in terms of feminist art criticism... at the end of the my speech I added, “additionally - and raising a different series of issues - there is also the question of how we define our position in relation to the conflict in the North”, and I don’t know whether it was just me, but I felt as if there was a change of the atmosphere in the room once that had been articulated. There was a real sense that certain things could not be said out loud.

FB

Yes, definitely - and I think this is also indicative of the stark difference between Belfast and Derry at the time, especially in terms of the cultural politics.  Within Belfast, you had the Arts Council Gallery, right in the city centre, which was a ‘hegemonic space’, a sort of neutralised bubble, as well as the college as previously mentioned, whereas my understanding is that in Derry the politics of culture was very different (you can see that just looking at the art programme of Orchard Gallery, which was then situated on the west bank of the River Foyle). Showing films like ‘Mother Ireland’ seemed totally appropriate in Derry, but I think that screening the same film in Belfast would have been very contentious – and it was OK to show it only in Republican-related or Nationalist circles. I guess that’s why the symposium took place in Derry, and it was probably very important for all these groups from South, North – Belfast and Derry – to gather there. And along with them, you have major international feminists like Moira Roth, May Stevens and Helen Chadwick as invited speakers. Finally, there was the support of Orchard that hosted the event. Moira and Helen had some previous connections with NI already; Helen had shown at ARE (Art Research Exchange) a couple of years before. Art Research Exchange is another key organisation, which I think was central in Northern Ireland and in the art politics of the 1980s. I think Moira and May both have had personal relationships with Pauline (Cummins) and Breeda (Mooney) - May in particular had travelled in Ireland quite a lot, she was friends with Pauline and Geraldine O’Reilly, and she was part of the wider American diasporic network. Another speaker at the event was Anne Carlisle, who was one of the Directors of Art Research Exchange and who was also very involved in NIWAG and she was campaigning for women artists’ visibility. Anne had a key role in the development of women artists’ organising. I remember there was also Fran Hegarty from IWAG [who] came over from Sheffield to attend the seminar and she brought some of her students with her, one of whom was Shirley McWilliam, who now teaches sculpture in Belfast.

FB

Not as we initially planned. I initiated the survey because I wanted to see who was out there, what were women working on, and how they found managing their practice with other responsibilities – as carer or in full time/ part time jobs.  I thought that a survey was a good way to get a sense of the situation. I got quite a lot of responses, but suddenly realised that the prospect of working through all that empirical information was just too daunting, and I could have missed a lot of information if I’d based my research solely on those who replied to the survey. As a research method I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, and on the top of that there were difficulties with the production of the book too. I guess, nobody tells you how to write the book, we were struggling to put it together, at least that’s my recollection of it. Joan was teaching full-time in NCAD, and I was still trying to work out where to position myself in relation to all of this. Some of the material and research I kept ended up informing chapters of ‘Art in Ireland Since 1910’, a survey book that was published twenty-something years later. The responses of the survey certainly helped me having a better awareness of 80s feminist politics in relation to art practices in Ireland. This research was also the catalyst for another recent project I have curated, the exhibition ‘Elliptical Affinities’ (2020), where I tried to bring together feminist-informed artistic practices from the 80s with more recent artworks, predominately by women artists.

FB

There were many connections happening, for example between the IWAG in London and NIWAG in the North… And that was directly linked with the artists that made these connections happening. An example is Alanna [O’Kelly], who - after being a member of IWAG and being involved the London’s arts scene - moved back to Dublin and started working there. Another artist that was a key “connector” is certainty Anne [Tallentire]. Anne came to Belfast to perform ‘Altered Tracks’ as part of ‘Identities’, at the opening night. It was a version of the performance she did for ‘Off the Map’ in the Chiesenhale. So again, that was forging very kind of strong links between artists and our organisations, I think.

FB

I am probably not the best person to talk to about those kinds of connections within the South specifically, I think I was more aware of what was going on in the North. But, as you said, you had Attic Press, you had people like Ailbhe Smyth who was - and still is - a major feminist theorist and activist, who was very much aware of the links between North and South, but as far as I know there were no formal links as such between organisations, it was more an awareness around these organisations operating in the Republic. WAAG itself operated in a very kind of formalised structure, with AGMs and regional meetings, NIWAG was quite different in comparison, we were trying to take a much more collective approach as such, and this was causing sometimes a bit of tension between the two areas.

FB

From what I gather it seems that one of WAAG’s objectives was to be recognised as part of a wider European feminist network group. WAAG wanted to be part of IAWA (the International Association of Women Artists), and because of that they self-organised themselves as a formal organisation - with AGMs and regular meetings. In comparison, it seems that NIWAG had a different, locally embedded approach and was working together like an artist collective… am I right in saying that?

FB

In a sense, yes. WAAG was trying to echo or replicate the same institutional structures that I felt we should have been proactively involved in critiquing and subverting. Which is a difficult thing to do if you are on the side of the “oppressed” or “underrepresented”. A few women in WAAG, like Pauline and Breeda, operated within more privileged circles of wealth and affluence than most women artists at the time. This doesn’t dismiss their awareness and involvement in feminism, Pauline especially based her important art practice in the 1980s and early 90s on shielding light on feminist-related issues and women’s experience. But they seemed more ‘at home’ in the managerial milieu in comparison with other feminist collective politics that I’d been part of, and I recognise that this disparity was a source of tension between us. While WAAG artists’ work was particularly pointing and hard hitting, it was clear that WAAG was operating almost like an institute. The organisation had a very strong institutional identity and I felt it lacked of institutional critique, which might have actually led to a different outcome – obviously, this is a personal opinion that comes from the idea I have on feminist spaces, informed by my previous experience of working in the Pavilion, which ethos was very much based on a collectivised feminist politics as a means of subverting and intervening within the institution. But it is also important to point out that the Pavilion was supported by an active relationship with feminist politics and feminist pedagogy departments at the University of Leeds - through the position of Griselda and people who had come after her. It was operating within a very different context than Ireland, and in retrospect I can say that it was difficult to try to run something like the Pavilion, without the same support network or funding structure.

FB

That is very true.

FB

I think yeah, that is an interesting one, I think again because I had education as an art historian abroad, when I came back to Northern Ireland, I suddenly discover that Art History was thought very differently there, the curriculum was very conventional. I don’t think there was even an Art History course as such at Queen’s or Ulster at that point, as a discipline it was considered almost marginal, and it tended to operate through the Open University. I became the Open University’s tutor for Art History of Northern Ireland as well and the Modern Art & Modernism course and being working in the Open University of Leeds previously I know that the way in which this discipline was taught and promoted was highly politicised, and I felt I really identified with this kind of practice and way of thinking about art practice. I still felt very much out on a limb, because of the way a lot of Art History as was being practised then in the North. One important influence and inspiration comes from the fact that I found myself surrounded by a lot of contemporary art which - quite frankly - I wasn’t really that familiar with. This encouraged me to start working a lot more on contemporary practices, at that point I was an art historian who occasionally wrote reviews of contemporary art, but then I started thinking of myself as much more as a critic and as a feminist art critic. It was a catalysing experience, but also felt quite isolating, I think because people had just come through a very different education system, or moved to England and not come back, I felt that the way I was approaching things was very different from a lot of other art historians.

FB

WAAG formally dissolved in the early nineties (1991), it became unsustainable to be run voluntarily by the same people. At the same time, a lot of WAAG artists became much more focused on their individual careers. It is about professional survival, it is about economics, and those kinds of priorities, including being successful as an individual artist, which is ironic given that we were trying to promote a sense of collectivity. The power of the model of the individual artist as entrepreneur eventually wins out, or it certainly did then, in the 90s art landscape in the island of Ireland. As an individual artist who works collectively you must face similar tensions within the groups you are in…

FB

Absolutely. If I think about all these women’s organisations that formed in the eighties and the nineties, they were both hugely dysfunctional and hugely exhilarating at the same time. It is interesting is that you have artists like Alice Maher, who really took the discourse around of the “identity” that was happening in the eighties, and really developed an individual career and practice based around making visible issues around gender identity, femininity and Irishness. These research interests led her to very successful individual practice, but also it contributed to the general awareness of a category that has been underrepresented in the arts before that [ the category of Irish – women – artist analised by Deepwell and Robinson] . I would like to think that the consciousness raising and the growth of awareness that WAAG advocated for, had a considerable positive effect, contributing to a sea change in how issues of gender and identity and Irishness have been perceived, in the art world and beyond it, from the 1990s onwards. At the same time, it is risky to generalise. Working at the same time as WAAG and NIWAG, there were artists like Dorothy Cross who were quite successful and who wanted to remain independent from these initiatives. Even as a young artist, she saw her position as being unrelated to women-led artists collectives, and she very interested in focusing solely on her individual practice and career.

On the other side, some collaborations between artists continued after the dissolution of WAAG, most noticeably Louise and Pauline’s duo-project “Sounding the Depths” (1992). This project – showcased in an institution like IMMA – represented a real sea-change, an important shift in culture politics towards the exploration of identities (gender and national) in post-nationalism scenario. In the context of milestones exhibitions like ‘In a State’ at Kilmainham Gaol - which was the 75th Anniversary of the Easter Rising - it was so important to have (finally) portrayed a range of issues around feminism and identity, including queer identities (mainly through Louise’s work). The presence of many artists coming from WAAG in that exhibition was an indication that a change was being made, and that identity politics were discussed in mainstream art environments.

FB

That’s true, and I personally felt it was very important to influence another, new, generation of artists, and contributing in this way to the ongoing debate around feminism in the arts. That’s quite an intangible legacy of these women’s groups and collectives…

FB

Certainty, but there was still a need for artists to come together and self-organise, specifically in those places at the periphery of the art market…  it is interesting that many artist-led organisations began to emerge around the early 90s. For example, Catalyst Arts in Belfast, established in 1993 on the on the model of Transmissions in Glasgow, which was founded in 1989. And that is another nudge to the continuous links and networks of artist-led activity between the island of Ireland and UK.

PC

PC:  I was lucky to have lived in Turkana, Kenya, and in Toronto, Canada before my return to Ireland in 1981. I wasn´t really part of the Irish art scene when I came back2. I was interested in the Project Art Centre and was lucky to know artists and writers who were making work there. The actor Suzy Kennedy introduced me to Niall Jordan and we met other artists such as Sheridan brothers and Olwen Fouéré at parties. I knew Brian Maguire, who was a painter, but I still felt that I was outside the Irish visual art scene. It was only when Temple Bar Galleries opened and I had a studio there in 1983, that I felt part of an art movement.

PC

The majority people more active in the committee - like Patricia Hurl, Patricia McKenna and Breeda Mooney – did and do define themselves as feminists and I certainly was very influenced by feminism. Our philosophy was influenced by feminism, and our ambition was influenced by feminism, and the leadership at the time were definitely feminist. Regarding the use of “collective”, that wasn’t the language of the time, it was an organisation, I mean I have used collective since with the performance collective, but that was just a small group of people doing the same thing together – but it was unusual to call it a collective then.

PC

In the introduction of your catalogue WAAG: Art beyond Barriers, you mentioned how feminist artists’ action in America and Britain influenced WAAG giving “women artists the confidence to trust their own abilities in order to overcome the negative evaluation resulting from pervasive discrimination against women" (Cummins, 1987). Do you recall what specific feminist artists’ actions from UK and/or US were inspirational for WAAG’s establishment?

PC

I had been influenced by US feminist writings since the 70s, and before that, of course the classic Second Sex by de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer´s The Female Eunuch, 1970. It was Greer´s The Obstacle Course, 1979 that was a constant companion and inspiration while I was involved with WAAG. The ICA in London had a very influential exhibition in 1980, selected by Lucy Lippard, ISSUE, social strategies by women artists. Many of the artists in this show whom I later was lucky to meet, had a great influence. May Stevens, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler and Alexis Hunter, who was from New Zealand but moved to London in 1972. It was the approach that these artists had to what art could be and the audiences they chose to speak to. WAAG was founded the same year as the Guerrilla Girls, May Stevens told me about them and may have put me in touch with them then. Their anarchic approach appealed, and we loved their action and humour.

PC

I think it would be helpful if you read the catalogue for Sounding the Depths, where Louise Walsh and myself outline the oppressive atmosphere of the 1980s in Ireland. It wasn’t essential that the struggles of women were at the forefront of members’ work, many members were not feminists, but they could see the inequalities in the art world and our society.

PC

It was then a tendency to have a less hierarchical structures in women`s groups. But I thought that for our ambitions we needed more structure. We had a constitution, so it was a little more formal than a group of friends or you know, it was hoping to make change through yeah, a more formal organisation that could interact with government departments and you know, be taken seriously. Catherine McGuinness was a High Court Judge in the South of Ireland at the time, she had very strong feminists in politics, and we asked her to look at the constitution we had drawn up and she helped us form that. We were very ambitious in the setting up of the group, and structure it in a way that would function properly. We were all very busy many of us with small children so there needed to be a timeline and deadlines. A structure allowed us to function, but it was still very informal, as many of us were friends.

PC

Friendship was key to the support structure of WAAG. While there were some formal meetings there were many informal, in the pub, chats and discussions. Friendship was very important between artists, organisers, historians, and writers. It was very important with IAWA, we were very friendly with EVA&CO who published articles about our work and the catalogue for Dublin/WAAG 1991, we remained friends with many international artists through WAAG.

PC

It was important to be part of a greater movement that was political and focused. We learnt when we first made contact with women artists in the Netherlands in 1985, it was inspirational to see how focused they were politically. And with historians, they were demanding equal representation in museums.

PC

This was more informal, we enjoyed meeting with Fionna Barber and Hilary Robinson, and Una Walker, it was important to have branches of WAAG all over Ireland, I think the group which was based mainly in Belfast felt that they had done a lot of work already within their own structures in NI.

PC

WAAG self-published their catalogue in 1988, one year later, WAAG was featured in the publication “Art Beyond Barriers – IAWA International Association of Women in the Arts 1989” published by the Frauen Museum in Bonn. Since its establishment, WAAG seems to have an interest in printed matter. On the minutes of the first WAAG meeting in 1987, I have found this action point: “Idea of publication, annual or quarterly, on women’s art and criticism to build up body of permanent reference materials – Pauline to work on this.”

Do you think that publications and printed matter were an effective tool in promoting women artists’ work, beyond the label of ‘women’s art’? Can you recall any women artist and women-led publications contemporary to WAAG?

PC

I produced the first WAAG publication called Irish Art, for Alanna O Kelly, Mary Duffy, and myself, when we were invited by May Stevens to attend and present our work at the Women's Caucus for the Arts in Boston. We were aware of how important publication was at that time, but funding was difficult this is without links with EVA& Co publishers in Austria, were so important.

PC

Had WAAG any direct or indirect relationship with the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement and/or its affiliates and was WAAG in contact with any other feminist-led group/collective in the Island of Ireland and beyond?

PC

I was aware of these groups and knew some of the women involved personally but as such WAAG had no direct contact with them.

PC

What was the relationship, if any, between the UK-based Women Artists Slide Library [WASL] & WAAG. Did any collaboration take place between the two organisations?

PC

Eye to Eye organised by Anne Tallentire with WASL was inspirational for me. She encouraged us to send our slides to WASL and we met many of their members. I met Katy Deepwell through WASL, and her publications were very influential. WASL was a member of IAWA but made the mistake of thinking the WAAG would be part of WASL and not an organisation in its own right, which didn’t go down well with us.

PC

Yes, IWAG was active in London and we benefited by their example, I met Alanna O’Kelly first and then Anne Tallentire, and there were exchanges of projects and ideas. WAAG invited Anne Tallentire to perform her work ‘Altered Tracks’ in our first WAAG exhibition (September 1987, Dublin, Guinness Hop Store).

PC

Many women in Ireland were already part of consciousness raising groups in the 1970s, thanks to these initiatives we were realising that we needed to talk to each other more openly and to share our experiences. In WAAG we tackled the feeling of isolation that many women artists felt, and by traveling to meet each other we were able to share our experiences. By organising exhibitions to allow the work to be seen, by having visiting artists to share their skills, and by having a collective voice to question the status quo. The conference we held in Derry was very powerful and the artists we got together there with the help of Declan McGonagle. These actions gave us great encouragement and confidence.

PC

It is hard for people now to understand the limited access to the arts that was available 30-40 years ago… While there had been changes in the 60s and the 70s with artists maybe making murals or trying to work with communities, particularly I would have been aware of the art scene in Dublin, the main function of art was still an entertainment for the rich, and galleries – both private and public - were purposely not welcoming for people from a working class and/or a disadvantaged background. There was a real attitude that a certain type of art was made for the amusement of the rich, the wealthy and the educated, and I think feminism also was trying to tackle that. The American feminist artists I was aware of were looking at ways to work with community in order to bring equality of access to art, and that was part of our interest also. One of our main goals was that we wanted to be seen and within the system that already existed and that we were excluded from - that meant having exhibitions, having forums, having debates within the existing art world.

There was a lot of discussion about where the money was going (i.e. where the governmental, public funding for the arts was going) so I would have been invited to talk on behalf of WAAG at different events or festivals or other type of discussions… they started to invite WAAG at these events to represent another point of view, so there would have been a lot of debates at the time in the 80s in art colleges, we were trying to influence change in many ways, but WAAG was about our work being seen on an equal level with the male artists and that we have been given the same chances and respect as our male colleagues.

I think we learned the politics of the art world very quickly and WAAG was set up to counteract what was happening - which was the systematic exclusion of women artists within the art system.  It is hard to believe now which were the attitudes towards women artists … if you were single and available and attractive – and this is disgusting but unfortunately true - then you were of interest to male artists… But the minute you had a child then it was like, it was almost like you were finished, you were written off, that was a tendency not only in Ireland, but everywhere.  It was political that we were fighting against these prejudices. And this included working with critics and journalists that understood about feminism and history of art from a feminist perspective… it was just small steppingstones, we were aware that it is hard to make change, and change is slow in Ireland.

PC

It was mostly anger… Louise Walsh and I made the artwork ‘Soundings Depths’ (1993), which came from all that frustration, all our anger about the way women were treated back then, so it was heavily influenced by all of those referenda and all the deaths of women, all the lack of justice, the lack of respect for women that was going on and on and on – both in the South and in the North.

PC

I think to do the work we were trying to do we had to have time and you know, that is the problem, some people were teaching and so they had an income from teaching, some people were doing community work and that helped them sustain their practice. I was working in prisons, with people in prisons and I was getting work within the community, so I had an income and I had a home, so I wasn’t worried about making enough money to pay the rent, so I was privileged in that way, but I chose to give my spare time to WAAG for those years which was very demanding and the same with Breeda Mooney, like we were artists and we should have been focusing perhaps on our own work, but in those years WAAG became “our [art-]work” - I see that quite clearly now - but it was very hard to manage everything. What I loved about WAAG’s first exhibition was that it was completely open to everyone, there was no discrimination based on education for example or previous artistic CV, it was just if you were a woman, and you were an artist self-defined then you can qualify and I am still very happy about that decision of being as inclusive as possible.

PC

Well yes, it was the first call for membership, and was also a project that involved showing 90 women... and we didn’t say ‘oh, you have to be from an art college’ or ‘you had to have had an exhibition’, we just chose the work and the first exhibition was everyone in and then of course you get all the kickback from the critics because they will say ‘it is not selected’ and ‘there is no theme’ and all these kind of things, so it was very hard to pursue that, because then the art world wanted to make its own criteria of value and was imposing it on you.

PC

Yes, like something kind of vaguely amusing and sexual.

PC

You know you are doing well when some critics gets nervous.

PC

We were purposely annoying them.

PC

Yes, that’s right, it was open to all. But even in that instance, it wasn’t accessible to all. There was an expense problem, lots of people could not afford slide photography, which was relatively expensive at the time, so that could have been a restriction, but I know there were people from ‘all walks of life’ - so to speak - in WAAG. When I have been writing about WAAG and about that time in Ireland, what emerged from it was the fact that many women were involved in education, for example Louise Walsh is still teaching in NCAD, Alanna O’Kelly was and still is an educator, as well as Patricia Hurl and Patricia McKenna. I think that work was very important because they were passing on the feminist approach to art-making and finding overlooked herstories and teaching students about the women artists who had been swept under the carpet or hidden or ignored. This had a big effect on the next generations of artists and is one of the key legacies of WAAG. After WAAG came to an end, I also began teaching in NCAD and brought video and photography into the discussion, which was not happening before that, so I think attitudes were changed in lots of ways.

PC

It was great to have people to talk to and to feel you were part of a group of people who were fighting for the same things. The international connection were also so important because there were artists who were way ahead in using video and video installation and had the support from government for studios and equipment and you could see ‘oh look, we should have what the Dutch have’, ‘we should have the support that the Swiss or Germans have’…. so people understood the potential and importance of that work, our peers and friends in Europe completely accepted that you would make videos, or completely accepted that you would have an installation of photography as your work, whereas in Ireland it was more difficult to be taken seriously if you used such media, so for me those links beyond Ireland with other Europe-based women-led artists’ groups were very important.

PC

Yes, absolutely, and it was also important to get the support of people that understood and loved your work, which was rarely the case in Ireland, while I’ve found a completely different approach in places like – for example - Austria, they would say ‘oh, that is fantastic, will you have a show’. There was much more positive attitude and much more opportunities, which we all needed.

PC

I think what happened was that we worked collaboratively from project to project, and then we had an annual meeting and elections every year, so everyone had a chance to say what they thought or what they wanted, so your voice could be heard. I also think it was very important to travel to meet WAAG members based in Galway, Cork, and Belfast… it helped people share thoughts and experiences, through conversation with us, they could say what the situation was for them and what the problems were for them. At the same time, it is hard to hear all the voices, you might be open, but people aren’t going to tell you everything about what is going wrong… There was a real urgency about what we wanted to do in what we felt was a desperate situation. Getting funding was difficult and required such an amount of work, like to even get a catalogue together or to get money to travel to Europe or bring work outside the country…Most of the time we were asking different members to do things, you asked me about the group who wanted to do research and statistics about women artists in Ireland, I wasn’t involved in that work group, but we were all doing our little bits. Getting together was important to update the others about what we were at. It was such an intense period, and when you look back you realise it was a very short-lived organisation.

PC

Yeah, what we tried to do was a lot, but in some areas we succeeded. I think we were really helped by journalists and our actions definitely had a positive effect: that you would not dare say there were no women, Irish women artists, you would never dare say that again. There was a sea change in attitude and then the publicity, where people began to see women artists existed, and they started to see all the work that was being done and I think that was really important for a general attitude.

PC

It was very fun; we were much the same age, and we were friendly and happy to know each other, besides really admiring the work for the Women’s Artists Slide Library. Nonetheless, we were shocked to discover that IAWA/Women’s Artists Slide Library presumed that we wanted to be a subsidiary of their organisation rather than an organisation in our own right, that was very political for us to be independent, while they thought that we would be like Scotland or Wales, that it would be the “British Isles” or something like that ... We were the most recent group but there were already other members of IAWA, like the Dutch, the Austrians, the Germans, the Italians - there were all these established groups, and we were coming to say: ‘we want to join’ and so we had to very quickly make alliances, which is so political. We became very friendly with the Dutch and the Austrians; I don’t know why, maybe it was just the personalities and they became our allies in any voting system because IAWA was a very old organisation with its constitution and all these rules and regulations… It was necessary to have allies because we might have been excluded as members or made to join with England which we thought was madness…

PC

Some of the groups were very well organised, the Dutch especially, as well as the Germans and the Austrians - they were familiar with funding and how you got money for their organisations, and they got support from Cultural Capital of Europe’s grants. For example, when Germany was the Cultural Capital of Europe, the Women’s Museum in Bonn had money to invite everyone from IAWA to send work… and that happened again in Austria, and then Dublin became Europe’s Cultural Capital in 1991, so it was “our turn” to invite women artists outside Ireland to take part in the events organised by WAAG - each women-led organisation choose their representative and we didn’t have control in that sense. It was a lot of work for us, because comparing to the other previous projects we were invited to, as organisers we weren’t properly supported in terms of funding and many people in the organisation couldn’t undertake extra work, so it was a demanding challenge for WAAG. Breeda Mooney was exceptional in the hard work she put in, as well as other people, everyone worked so hard to fundraise and to organise a huge seminar with the Guerrilla Girls, and with Mary Robinson as invited speaker, it was amazingly exciting and powerful, but exhausting, it reminds me about the swans looking serene on top and then their feet are going crazy underneath - but it was a great experience.

PC

We wanted to look after our invited artists properly, when we went to Switzerland we were looked after and people put us up in their houses, and we wanted to reciprocate that, so many invited artists were staying in WAAG members’ houses, and anyone who had a spare place in Dublin.

PC

You become friends, I think we all made friends in different countries and the friendships lasted a long time.

PC

What we have already said about visibility is very important for me, as well as what the fact that at the start of the 90s there seemed to be more women teaching in the arts departments.

I think WAAG it has allowed a lot of women artists to be more confident and that would mean being more ambitious in their work and expectations… I don’t think women artists were content to be ignored anymore, so it was ‘no, that is not good enough’, responding to injustice getting out there and fight for what you want.

UW

I was involved initially in the setting up of WAAG, I remember attending the meeting that Jenny Haughton, the then Director of the Sculptor Society of Ireland (now Visual Artists Ireland), organised in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary in April 1987 I had been in correspondence with her a few months prior (I can see here a letter from the 11th February 1987), and I knew she was putting together a proposal for an exhibition, and as part of that she wanted to organise a meeting with women artists across the island. Jenny played an important role in getting this whole process underway. My memory of it was that the meeting took way longer than what was planned… especially the first part, where artists were showing slides of their work, this was to be followed by the agenda that Jenny had provided concentrated very much on the notion of ‘out of pressure’ - the concept of the exhibition. By the end of that meeting, people were talking about possible future exhibitions, as well as beginning a network or group for women artists, and the idea of organising a national conference… Fionna Barber wrote a report about that meeting, I have it there…  Fionna stated that ‘at the end it was decided that large exhibition of women’s artwork probably to be held in Dublin would have to wait a while, in the meantime it is important for us to build strong foundations, not only do women artists need to develop their own work in an atmosphere of support from other women’ and broadening all our audiences anyway.’ At the time, many artists in Ireland were starting to set up organisations and projects. Jenny was probably imaging a show coming out of the meeting, but even if that didn’t directly happen, in a way the exhibition that WAAG did in the Guinness Hop Store later in 1987 came out of that meeting… although WAAG’s show was much more informal, less structured than a curated show. On the 8th of April a letter was sent out saying ‘after the meeting in Clonmel, it was proposed that we set up an association of women’s artists, artists for women’s critics and curators called the Women’s Art Inspection Group and that a meeting will be held in Galway on the 30th of May.’ I wasn’t at the meeting in Galway, and I wasn’t part of the WAAG executive committees, so I was not involved in any decision making, but I was a member and received  any of the information that was  being circulated. I also took part in the two exhibitions in Dublin, respectively in Guinness Hop Store and in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. At the time I was very involved in the arts scene and I was on a number of boards - the Association of Artists in Ireland and the Artists Collective of Northern Ireland, and I then went on to be on the committee of the International Association of Artists. When I look at my diary I can see that I was constantly going to meetings and travelling… Due to these other commitments, I only took part  occasionally in WAAG’s events and projects. Looking at my diary of 1987, I can see that the1re was a meeting scheduled for the 19th March at Fiona Barber’s place, but was later cancelled, but then it was rescheduled on the 23rd April, so obviously that was after the meeting in Clonmel.  Belfast was easier for me to get to , so I was often at NIWAG’s meetings in the flat that Fionna shared with Louise Walsh and Alice Maher. I feel that Fionna was instrumental in pursuing women artists’ organising from the Northern Irish end. With NIWAG, we were able to raise a bit of funding, I have a note that  through the Down District Council we applied for funding using my address. Belinda  Loftus who was the Arts Officer at the time I think was sympathetic, so we had a little bit of money for postage and photocopying and things like that. In the first year, WAAG and NIWAG were totally separate  organisations.

UW

Well I think they were coming from slightly different directions. Fionna is an art historian and I think her interest was more research-informed/research-led, while others in the group might have been more interested in opportunities for exhibiting and discussing work… I have the minutes of a series meetings that were held then throughout 1987, and  the main focus was organising an exhibition in ARE titled ‘Identities’. You can see the PR material there, it was produced by ARE, which had a print workshop design facilities – the cover is a drawing by Elaine Thomas. I had a solo show in London at the time that coincided almost completely with Identities’ programming, so did not take part in the project… but I do remember going to see it, the main exhibition was held in the ARE Gallery. One of the artists - Lynn Davis Jones – installed her piece in a barn just beside her house, which was very close to where I lived, and I remember Pauline Cummins and possibly Breda Mooney came up to see the show, including the Lynn Davis Jones’ off-site intervention. I am looking again at my archive - oh this is interesting – a meeting was called at the beginning of 1988 to discuss the response to the conference organised by WAAG in the Orchard Gallery in Derry. In the minutes there is a note that says that WAAG have organised this as a major event in the North without any prior consultation with NIWAG, however, planning is still at an early stage, so there was still time for us to be involved… 

Later in 1988, it was decided that NIWAG was to become a Northern branch of WAAG. Well, let’s say that any independent activities or any specifically Northern Ireland geared activities at that stage had petered out. From the newssheets I gathered that both Catherine McWilliams and Rita Duffy were the Northern Ireland representatives, but after 1988 there was no further specific activity in Northern Ireland after the Derry Conference, apart from a few meetings between Belfast-based artists. NIWAG became the Northern Ireland Branch of WAAG, and became part of the overall organisation, and we were catching up through the newsletter and regular meetings. There were also meetings and get-togethers happening in Galway and Cork – which was great, because it could reach more artists in the island. People from the south or West would not necessarily get to Dublin often and might not the time nor the resources to go to the meetings.

UW

As members were asked to send in proposals to WAAG for the ‘Art Beyond Barriers’ exhibition in Dublin, and so many artists applied and more than 40 exhibited. I was assigned one of the small corner rooms for my work, and I remember setting up my piece and quickly returning to Belfast. So, I’m not sure if I saw all of the exhibition installed and wasn’t at the opening. I was often down to Dublin for meetings with the artists association, but I did not have time for the socialising side of things because I had childcare responsibilities and had a distance to travel… In addition, at the time the political situation here wasn’t particularly good, and it was better to avoid hanging around late at night or having to get a late train. I lived (and I still live) more than 30 miles outside of Belfast, so there were always long journeys involved.

UW

I think you are right saying that there was a collision between the ambition to be inclusive and at the same time having the responsibility of being an organisation that represented the work of women artists. For instance, when there was a call out for artists to exhibit in a show in Bonn the selector issued a statement - I do not know if you saw that or not, but it was quite funny.  There was quite a hectoring, scolding tone in some of the communications that came from WAAG, in this instance a statement was sent to the people who had submitted saying ‘we were disappointed with the general level of presentation and submission provided to us […] a substantial number of artists failed to provide visual documentation or simply provided single slide, many did not address the theme of ‘Art Beyond Barriers’. At the end they said that they felt happy with five submissions which included Pauline Cummings, and Mary Duffy…  Another factor may have been the lack of funding available for artists, especially if not established or if not represented by any gallery, so the artists from WAAG participating in international exhibitions ended up being the ones that were able to finance themselves through fund-raising…  I presume there was a small Arts Council grant at least, but I doubt if there were the resources for overseas travel.

UW

I totally agree. Another point of contradiction was whether it was actually beneficial for women’s’ visibility being part of women-only ‘separatists’ events, which in a way were ghettoising those artists that were often excluded from mainstream exhibitions. Another thing that WAAG did was to put together a slide library of Irish women artists, on the model of the UK women artists slide library… I guess it was another attempt to prove that women were doing valid work within the contemporary Irish art scene. 

UW

You mention before the influence of women artists from the US, I was certainly aware of the work around feminism being produced at that time…  I have actually a note about Moira Roth – who came up to Derry for the WAAG seminar - I amaze myself when I look back at these diaries, I have found at the back a note of what I had been reading that year, and I was updating the list every month. I had noted out that ‘having borrowed a copy of ‘The Amazing Decade Performance Art, Women’s Performance Art in the 1970’s’ there had been an exhibition of that title and then a publication followed in 1983 or 84… so this is it at the end of 1987 I was borrowing a copy of that, actually from an artist in Cork - Danny McCarthy- and I have a note here that was a very good chronology for the sixties and seventies, very good essays. I think I was aware of the art being produced by women in the US through publications like the Artists Newsletter (which then morphed into the Artists Information Company), which I was subscribed to and so I was getting the newsletter monthly. A-N contained loads of information about artists’ opportunities and lots of practical information on materials and technique, but also information about organisations, groups, and collectives. Through A-N I became aware of the Women Artists Slide Library, and I was one of their members from about 1982. WASL produced a publication called Women’s Artists News, and I remember also getting the Feminist Art News along with that. So, I would have had quite a lot of information about what was happening with, across the board in terms of arts and feminist-informed art, which was my interest focus.

On a personal level, I was interested in feminist literature, i.e. Simone De Beauvoir memoirs, The Feminine Mystique and Sweet Freedom by Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell – this last one was an history of British Women’s liberation feminism, which had a big influence on my work. Another book that I have found very influential was Marina Warner’s Alone of all her sex, which having been raised in a Catholic household seemed to me to explain an awful lot about both the behaviour of women in Ireland and the power of Catholic Church. That moves me onto my personal experiences working as an artist, certainly the subject of a lot of my work at that time was based on mythologies and my experience of the claustrophobic and controlling Church/State. Around that time my children were at the stage of making their First Communion and I have to say I was disgusted and horrified by the whole thing, so actually a lot of my work reflected on that sense of repulsion I had for this institution. I had made a whole series of works that had about little mummified babies wearing bonnets, with bandages going across and around their faces. This was representing the silencing of women, and the control of women’s bodies at the time. While contraception was available in Northern Ireland, it wasn’t in the South. I come from a family from either side, my mother is from Dublin, and I spent a lot of time there, so I was aware of the situation in both parts  of the island. In the 1980’s women that got married still had to leave their work if they were teaching or the civil service. That time was also marked by a series of dreadful events, like the Kerry babies’ case, the case of Ann, the tragic story of the young girl who died in a grotto… these kinds of things were in the papers, and they were the appalling and horrific consequences on a society that was deeply misogynistic.  

UW

Yes, I can remember being in Dublin for a meeting when the second one went through. While it is important to mention that WAAG was set up to create opportunities for women to show their work, it was also operating within a context of the oppression of women, and this oppression being so much to the forefront in the media, and in the public opinion. Even though I do not remember at the time that the wider political context being addressed during WAAG’s meeting, it is within that wider context that WAAG happened. It was something unsaid – and when you are in the midst of things, it can also be difficult to see them clearly or speak up. In retrospect, I am asking myself how comes these things were not being openly discussed, and I know that you are involved in a certain amount of direct campaigning and things, so I am thinking ‘well how come there was no rally or protest around abortion rights or anything like that’, things that could have been very relevant at the time… I suspect it was hard to see clearly at the time, but also in the context of the WAAG, taking a political stake would probably have caused inner conflicts. These issues were very controversial, even in a feminist artists’ group, and the priority at them time was to bringing women together, not take them apart.

UW

There was a lot going on: I was involved in several other artists organisations and feminist initiatives, i.e., the Belfast Women’s Collective and Women’s News that used to meet in ‘Just Books’ in Winetavern Street… they used to print their magazine in the Belfast Print Workshop. Women’s News put together a series of essays in 1986 about ‘ten years of feminism in Northern Ireland, and they included all the various groups that were active in those years. I remember going to feminist meetings in town, looking at my diary and notes I can see the name of Ines McCormick - a Trade Unionist.  –I was active in the Women’s Coalition later on, the Women’s party who stood for the elections and took part in all the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement… My memory is that Belfast Women’s Collective’s meetings were focused two major issues, the feminist response (and support) to republicanism and the issue around sexuality. At the time several women were incarcerated in the Armagh Prison as political prisoners. It was perceived as very divisive to support the women in prison, because the collective was initially dealing with broad issues around women’s equality and then - as always with everything in Northern Ireland - there would always be an opportunity for people to take offence or to disagree.  The other issue as I said was around sexuality, many of these organisations were mostly lesbian-led and I often felt that my experience as somebody who was married and with children wasn’t as relevant as others. 

UW

You are right, and that is especially valid when you have emerging voices which are rightfully trying to make space for themselves. It was obviously very important at that time that people were beginning to find a voice… but as I mention, you had in the room lots of different strands, you have got political strands and then sexual politics strands. Considering all these divergences and different perspectives, trying to move forward together implies the possibility of rupture, which is almost inherent in the feminist project. Another important thing to remember is that none of these organisations were existing in a vacuum, there was all kind of crossovers and reciprocal influence, it is important to look at them as multiple layers - as you said previously - of the same environment, regardless the inbuilt contradictions. Much later , I developed a work that was basically focused on a survey of exhibitions in Belfast from 1968 to 2004. The information was presented as a printed-out database, which was following how different activities expanded and contracted over time. When I saw it on the wall, I could clearly see that there was a lot of artist-led venues, and they were very active, producing a notable number of exhibitions and events. Some of these initiatives had a short run, mostly due to personal life commitments of whoever oversees them… since we know that Belfast’s artist-led scene was – and still is - mostly voluntary-run.  But what I notice would happen is that a certain activity/project almost ‘disappears’ or ‘contracts’, and later it expands again when a new lot of young, enthusiastic people come along.

UW

Friendship was certainly key. To a certain extent, WAAG & NIWAG genuinely supported artists through a celebration of other people’s exhibitions and events. In the WAAG’s newsletter there was always a list of members and associates’ activities. Although there was not so much in terms of opportunities of working collaboratively between artists.  In my experience, that kind of support came earlier through artists’ groups like the Artists Collective of Northern Ireland, and a number of venues that were very welcoming to emerging artists who just graduated from college – for example, the Crescent Arts Centre and Fenderesky Gallery… The MA in Fine Arts opened its door in Belfast in 1979 and many people were going back to education to do it (it was the only one MA with practice available in the island of Ireland). There was quite a supportive atmosphere, and a real energy from people coming from all over to join the course. So, you have young artists from different backgrounds coming together, try to make work and looking for support and opportunities to show their work. There was also genuine peers’ support – going to one another’s exhibitions and having crits together – and there was of course also rivalry between students! - but all of that in the context of a very healthy environment, in my personal experience.  As part of WAAG, I suppose I made many long-lasting friendships, for example I was friendly with Alice Maher, and many years later then when I was working in NIVAL in Dublin I use to stay at  her flat and she stayed over occasionally, and we had wonderful chats…  in NCAD at the same time Pauline Cummings and Louise Walsh did a job share in the sculpture department, so I was in  contact with them too. I would have been very friendly with Jenny Haughton for a long time, but with the kids growing up and being involved in different things (I was doing a PhD in Ulster at the time) it does not leave enough time to socialise. 

UW

I don’t know whether WAAG was in contact with them. When I was speaking earlier about going to meetings in the Belfast Women’s Collective, that was on a personal level, so I am not aware if there would have been crossovers between organisations. But on the individual level, as often happens in Ireland, it is not impossible that people who were involved in WAAG were involved in other organisations simultaneously, but again you would either have to work through the WAAG archive or interviewing other people.

UW

Yes, and you must remember that all those communications went on through printed matter: meeting minutes, letters, post, posters, newsletters and magazines… 

UW

I remember the show in the Chisenhale in June 1987, Fionna Barber was involved in that, and this is another example of how these women-led artists’ activities were all happening at the same time. Actually, the Irish Women Artist Group – mostly, but not solely London-based – started before WAAG. 

UW

I am glad to say that groups like WAAG and NIWAG would be anachronistic now. I think representation of women in cultural events has ceased to be an issue today. I  did surveys for the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition in the 90s, particularly looking at Arts Council funding to see what the distribution of grants in relation to gender was - and there was no indication of bias that I could see.  Nonetheless, on further thought while reading this transcription, I can’t help feeling that the position of women has now become less and less certain. Especially in recent years, as the influence of the extreme right starts penetrating societies, women's rights come under attack. WAAG and NIWAG took on their shoulder the groundwork that needed to be done and couldn’t wait longer. Maybe it is just speculation on my part thinking that having raised the issues and questioned how things were being done, institutions and organisations and those individuals that were making decisions were required to be more mindful and more deliberate in their decision making - rather than just following a traditional path. If in some organisation or exhibition or whatever there were no women in it, I think people would certainly notice after NI/WAAG’s work… and after a while the counting stopped, I can’t remember when, but at some point, and was not necessarily anymore to check if women had been included or not, it just ceased to be an issue.

UW

And there is certainty an indirect legacy, in terms of collective working and advocacy. For example, people like Alice Maher who was involved in significant aspects of WAAG and NIWAAG, few years ago became one of the leading ‘Artists for repeal the 8th’, along with artist Cecily Brennan. A lot of artist-led activism certainty re-emerged in the arts and beyond at the time of the ‘Repeal the 8th campaign’ in the south of Ireland. And it influenced artists in the North too… Array Collective is the example of that.