By Emily Oldham. Since Flo Read’s Twin Primes won Best Script and Best Production in the 2015 Oxford New Writing Festival, she has gone on to develop several more acclaimed plays. Her work has been performed both nationally and internationally, including at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015 and 2016. She recently graduated from Oxford University with … Continue reading
By Ellen Pasternack and Emily Oldham. Many people think of Georgia O’Keeffe as ‘that artist who paints flowers to look like vulvas’. Judy Chicago and others pick out her 1923 ‘Grey Lines With Black, Blue and Yellow’ as particularly yonic, for example. So we were surprised to learn that not only was this resemblance … Continue reading
Sophie Dowle has compiled a (very loosely ranked) list of great films directed by great women. What are your favourites? Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi (and Vincent Paronnaud) [France/Iran/USA, 2007] A classic, and a must-watch for teenagers searching for their identity. This stunning animation makes you laugh and cry as you follow Marjane’s journey to adulthood via … Continue reading
By Emily Oldham. Picture a room: spacious, with blank-white walls, it seems the height of impersonality. From this coldness loom dozens of furniture pieces, every crevice suffused by cement, figures of unapologetically brutal beauty. Some contain embedded hair, bone and even clothing. The absence of a body becomes starkly physical; concrete seeps into every inch of … Continue reading
By Sophie Dowle. Lalla Essaydi is an influential Moroccan-American artist, whose uncompromising portrayals of women have sent waves across the art world. Bold, brave and unafraid to make frank and honest statements regarding gender and the Middle East, Essaydi challenges the tropes of Orientalism head-on in her work. When I spoke to her, her passion … Continue reading
By Alice Theobald In executing a fictional will, sixteenth-century poet Isabella Whitney not only presented a defence of women’s legal legitimacy but also externalised herself into the city, channelling her personal impulses into the physical structures and material goods of her London. However, rather than reducing herself to a commodity, she uses her distribution of … Continue reading
By Alice Theobald So much more than an exercise in travel writing, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark accounts her unrequited love for her supposed partner, Gilbert Imlay. Reading more like a tragedy in epistolary form, Wollstonecraft’s account of the landscape is interwoven with personal reflections on her … Continue reading
