Trying...to reframe

Why are we seeing what we are seeing? Who polices the borders of what we are told to value?

I snatched 90 minutes last week to lose myself in the Tate Britain’s Now You See Us exhibition - Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920. (An example of the vital “sips of selfhood”, as the writer Natasha Randall beautifully puts it, I imbibe wherever I can between mothering and work).

And unlike some exhibitions where I don’t concern myself that much with the panels and all of the literature because I want to lose myself in the art, these were essential reading.

Precisely because these women and their creative endeavours had been unseen, explanations were needed and a key part of the experience. And in many cases, some serious sleuth work by archivists and curators, to track down any information at all about these unrecognised and mostly un-encouraged women artists, had gone down.

But it was one panel that stopped me and forced a radical reframe.

It read: “In 1770, the Royal Academy banned ‘Needle-work, artificial Flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles’ from its exhibitions…Other categories of art that the Academy considered ‘lower’, such as miniature painting, pastel and watercolour were also treated dismissively. Joshua Reynolds, the Academy’s President said that working in pastel was unworthy of real artists and was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement.’

“These ‘lower arts’ were the ones that women practised the most.”

Go figure.

Think about who has policed the border of what is deemed art.

Think what needlework might have become if there hadn’t been such arbitrary rules predicated on prejudice.

To position what a woman can do, is interested in and has access to, sometimes in very limited circumstances expressly because she is a woman, as lower, has huge knock-on effects.

Who dominates culture today? What is seen as the lead news story? What industries are the most lucrative? How is a woman’s work in any field valued? What are still seen and nurtured as women’s interests versus male?

To see such degradation in what should be the freest of spaces, art, was a sobering reminder of how even the most joyous things have been rigged. And how you need you to keep your wits about you.

I find it helpful in many circumstances to consider the following questions: what am I not seeing? What is the part of the story not on show here? Is this the only way to see this? Couldn’t it be done differently?

Put more bluntly: what am I not being told? Is this the full story.

Thinking like this is tiring and not always necessary. But it is hard-wired into me as both a journalist and a woman.

Nearly 10 years ago I delivered a TEDx on female ambition. I still recommend women to learn from snails and keep their antennae up. At the time Lord Grade, the former BBC chief, told me that many men hadn’t gotten any less sexist; they had just got better at hiding it.

After recently completing nearly four years in the Woman’s Hour hot-seat, I concur.

Now only if I could sew as easily as I write. Think of the needlework. Think of the needlework. But would anyone display it? Or value it?