Cat's Do Not Go To Heaven
curated by Caity Reynolds
14 — 29 September 2019
Opening Reception: 13 September 2019, 6 - 9pm
In her essay, Shakespeare’s Sister, published in the eminent feminist text, A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf critiques the words of historian G. M. Trevelyan, who asserted that cats do not go to heaven, and women cannot write the words of Shakespeare. In 2013, Knighted German artist Georg Baselitz infamously stated in an interview, “Women do not paint very well. It’s a fact.”
While many of the barriers to having a creative practice that existed in Woolf’s time have been dismantled through rigorous efforts of 20th-century activists, it would be naïve to suggest we are (regardless of gender) free from the fetters of patriarchy. Almost a century on, Woolf’s text remains an unsettling and uncanny mirror to contemporary conversations surrounding certain gendered experiences.
Cat’s Do Not Go to Heaven brings together five artists who make work while experiencing the world as women: Savannah Jarvis, Dana Lawrie, Mary Letain, Ally McKay and Kate McKay, who each make art very well. It’s a fact.
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This project has been assisted by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland |
| Exhibition documentation: Charlie Hillhouse |