This is our last Woman Up! On Tour episode for 2023. 

We would like to take this opportunity to send a massive thanks to all organizations that worked with us this year and all the amazing artists that shared their work with us, reminding us of what's possible to create and achieve even when challenged. 

Thanks to Jess Gell for her amazing video skills and acegrams for making it all possible. 

And lastly THANK YOU! Thank you to all our incredible listeners, you've been an amazing support and we appreciate you all for taking the time to hear us out!

We wish you all a peaceful and happy transition into the new year

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In this episode we talk to wonderful artist Rosy Martin.

Rosy Martin (born London 1946) is an artist-photographer, psychological-therapist, workshop leader, lecturer and writer. She explores the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes using self-portraiture, still life photography and video.
Starting in 1983, working with the late Jo Spence, she evolved and developed a new photographic practice- phototherapy - incorporating re-enactments. Through embodiment, they explored the psychic and social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday. My ‘therapeutic gaze’ provided a safe space for exploring one’s own stories in profoundly innovative ways.

Exhibiting Internationally and publishing widely since 1985, she has investigated issues including gender, sexualities, ageing, class, location, shame and family dynamics. Her photographic practice is grounded in research, the subjects arise from personal lived experiences, yet communicate to a broad audience. For example in ‘Transforming the suit: what does a lesbian look like?’ 1987 she played with different historical and contemporary stereotypes to challenge simplistic assumptions.

She used still life and video in ‘Too close to home?’ to explore the experiences of pre-bereavement, loss, grief and reparation by focusing upon her childhood home as a metaphor/metonym for both her father and mother, anticipating and mourning their deaths. She researched working-class suburban life inspired by this semi-detached house, almost unchanged since the 1930s. In ‘The end of the line’ she photographed through tears a soft and melancholy goodbye to her roots.
 
On turning fifty, her focus became contesting the dominant representations of ageing women, a subject she has returned to in her seventies. Using humour, play and parody the ageing body is reconfigured as present, joyous and defiant.
 
Martin has run intensive experiential phototherapy workshops and given lectures in Universities and Galleries throughout Britain, the USA, Canada, Eire and Finland. She also ran workshops in community settings, including a women's prison, projects with survivors of sexual abuse and school-based projects on digital identities. 

In this episode we are in Margate at Liminal Gallery  talking to founder and curator Louise Fitzjohn and Margate based artists Mercedes Workmen and Catherine Chinatree. 

Liminal Gallery represents contemporary artists working across the UK and Ireland. Its main ethos is to present an all-round snapshot of what is happening right now in contemporary art, showcasing artists at all stages of their careers working across all mediums. 

Mercedes is a self-taught artist; predominantly working in ceramics but also other areas of sculpture, painting and drawing.

After her mum died in January 2020 she decided to make some tiles for a splash back in her kitchen and it grew to be huge project; she created enough tiles for 3 bathrooms, a utility room and her whole kitchen.

Her work is a response to her overactive mind. She has ADHD and work fast and determinedly. Themes that recur in her work are relationships and interactions, perceptions, judgements, idiosyncrasies, cliches. Most usually around womanhood, motherhood and identity

Catherine is a multidisciplinary artist, with a strong focus on large scale paintings, both indoors and outside. The work can be described as both figurative and socially surreal. She also work with sound and moving image in a collage type of way, connecting footage/sound at random. 

Most of her inspiration comes from the events of everyday life, of symbolism and rituals and the people she meets. Often complex layers of history, social anthropology and Cultural displacement become part of the work, as she investigate the notion of the constructed self and human behaviour. Being of Welsh, Caribbean and Irish descent, She is deeply rooted in hybrid culture, and the idea of a shared reality. Not only between us as humans, but also everything that makes up our natural/supernatural world, and how we balance between the two. 

In this episode we are at Friction Arts in Birmingham talking to Sandra Hall Artistic Director and co-founder of Friction Arts (alongside Lee Griffiths) and artists Natalie Mason and Savhanha Small Wyn.

For 30 years, Friction has produced an ambitious programme of creative work, often in partnership or collaboration with artists from all kinds of disciplines; currently it includes Birmingham’s only free visual art club for young people delivered by professional artists, a ground-breaking multicultural music programme in schools and community settings, our Culture Club for young people, A Word From the Wise – a programme celebrating the work of elders and older artists, currently through our ‘Home’ project, Walking Over Coals, with an artist development programme for emerging, emerged and submerging artists and an ever-evolving series of site-specific performances and interventions in a variety of settings like their between-lockdown show ‘Quiet Carnival’.

Natalie Mason is a performer-composer, facilitator and researcher.Natalie has been directing the Multicultural Music Making project (MMM) she created in partnership with Friction Arts. As a multi-instrumentalist, Natalie has performed and recorded internationally at the BBC Proms, FIFA World Cup, Symphony Hall and Real World Studios. She has been commissioned as a composer by Surge Orchestra, Flatpack Film Festival and Dorcha, with her music played on BBC Radio 3. She is a member of avant-pop experimental duo Kamura Obscura, co-curates alternative music night Club Integral Midlands Branch and recently completed a national tour with The Nightingales.

Savhanha Small Wyn, a poet, writer and mum to two under two of Vietnamese-Jamaican-British heritage. Savhanha is a poet and writer and has been published in the Visual Verse with my poem 'Pieces', and have since had three more published on their site ('A Knight's Tale', 'Firewatch', and 'Spring'), along with a piece published on Spare Parts Lit and another on Halu Halo Journal, and two more pieces to be published during 2023. Since having her children Savhanha has realised the difficulties of freelancing and childcare which inspired her to launch an Arts zine online called RECESSES, a multi-media zine that focuses on work that's been rejected, forgotten, or is new and experimental.