Suffrage Selection

To mark the 125th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in Aotearoa the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu has mounted an exhibition called “We Do This”, featuring works by women from their collection.  I didn’t have time in a recent visit to see them all, but I loved Julia Morison’s ‘Teaching Aid #1: Appropriate Brushes for Large Flower Paintings’.

Appropriate Brushes

This is a collection of giant paintbrushes, coated in paint, and arranged to look like giant exotic blooms (or possibly floor mops).  The work acknowledges the female art tradition of flower painting as well as women’s traditional cleaning role.

Each brush has a plaque beside it with an historic quote about women’s painting, e.g. “The forest and wild flowers fade away forever before the march of civilisation; and it is only by such pictures as Miss North’s that the majesty and wonder of one, and the gorgeousness and delicacy of the other, can be recorded or adequately suggested.” – H V Barnett on Miss Marianne North’s Paintings at Kew, in ‘Magazine of Art’, 1882.

The exhibition will remain until May 2019, and I shall definitely go again.

“I’m pleased to see this women’s art
displayed within the city’s heart.”