2016 · Hope Mill, Manchester

A Shrine to Women’s Work

An exhibition and participatory archive of eleven artists’ responses to paid, unpaid, familial and creative work.

About the project

A Shrine to Women’s Work brought together work by eleven artists reflecting on matrilineal influences in their working and playing lives: mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, alongside the artistic grandmothers of their chosen forms.

Initiated and facilitated by Amy Voris, the shrine grew through extended conversations about familial and vocational lineages. Each contributor made something that carried aspects of this embodied and relational history into their present creative practice.

The works were assembled in the collective’s Hope Mill studio, a building marked by nineteenth-century textile labour. Visitors made a small pilgrimage to the edge of the city and were welcomed with tea, cake and conversation; nearly forty people visited across the two-week exhibition.

Artists

Commissioned work

Artists and works

…I Clinched It…!

Zoe Robertson

Comfort / Resting / Place

Christian Kipp

After Mrs Mills

Anna Macdonald

Spun

Laura McGee

Home Practice

Emma Meehan

I want more / I will win

Jennifer Reid

Untitled (or sisterhood is global: and other little stories; an inventory left hanging)

Sara Spies

تكلمي

Dani Abulhawa

Untitled (Anne and Hannah)

Hannah Buckley

You Are

Bridget Fiske

Knees Up Mother Brown

Natalie Garrett Brown

Further background

The thinking around A Shrine to Women’s Work

Amy’s research began with the working and playing lives of familial grandmothers and with the “grandmothers” of her art form. It asked how women’s social histories might be brought to light through personal storytelling, conversation and embodied practice.

Early research at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford reinforced the importance of personal stories. Conversations held during Gathering 1 then led Amy to invite eleven people to speak in greater depth about the paid and unpaid work of their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and about their vocational and artistic lineages.

Contributors considered how those lineages manifest in their own work and how they might continue, divert or subvert what they had inherited. The resulting objects and installations formed a collective archive of work that is often overlooked or held privately.

For Amy, the project also held a tension between the freedoms of her own working life and the constrained choices available to her grandmothers. That tension became a resource for movement, including the developing practice Perch, which layered precisely situated movement images across the studio at dusk.

Project archive

Images from A Shrine to Women’s Work

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 1 — 01

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 2 — 02

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 3 — 03

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 4 — 04

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 5 — 05

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 6 — 06

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 7 — 07

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 8 — 08

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 9 — 09

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 10 — 10

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 11 — 11

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 12 — 12

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 13 — 13

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 14 — 14

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 15 — 15

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 16 — 16

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 17 — 17

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 18 — 18

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 19 — 19

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 20 — 20

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 21 — 21

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 22 — 22

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 23 — 23

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 24 — 24

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 25 — 25

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 26 — 26

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 27 — 27

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 28 — 28

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 29 — 29

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 30 — 30

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 31 — 31

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 32 — 32

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 33 — 33

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 34 — 34

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 35 — 35

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A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 39 — 39

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 40 — 40

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A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 79 — 79

A Shrine to Women’s Work project documentation, photograph 80 — 80