AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘The way the images overlap, interchangeable, unreal in their wrapping,’ I say. ‘At least, that’s how I see it.’
She takes a step back. ‘I’ve been working around deconstructing constructed images of women. Not that it’s particularly original.’
She laughs, nervous now, which surprises me. It seems I’m not the only one uncomfortable with showing off my work.
‘Well, it’s more considered than some of the feminist art I admired at college in the early eighties,’ I say.
‘Oh, those visceral vaginas and menstrual celebration!’ She sits down next to me on the sofa.
‘Yes, Gaynor, my first girlfriend, had a huge appliquéd vulva on her bedroom door.’
She raises her eyebrow, suppressing a smile and I take a breath at my mentioning a woman lover. And it comes to me, I dreamt of Gaynor last night, beckoning through piles of discarded collage, her face glowing in the halo of her blond hair, then morphing into Gabriella. The detail is hazy, but the expectation of reaching Gabriella is palpable.
‘But it was necessary at the time,’ she continues.
I pull my attention back. ‘It always embarrassed me, you know. Pure prudishness – I blame my puritan father.’
‘Ah, and would you say you’re still prudish?’ she teases.
I pull back, my arms around my chest, in a gesture of uptightness that isn’t entirely a joke. ‘Let’s say I was more attracted to the cleaner graphic style. People like Barbara Kruger and Louise Nevelson. Though back in the days, I wasn’t beyond daubing words like WANKER across my careful photo-montages.’
‘Angry woman art!’
‘Absolutely. Subverting male establishment ideas of artistic merit. My tutors called it infantile, sacrificing the art for the message. I probably still do that, you know.’ That haunting hopeless failure from my work at the exhibition.
She shakes her head, the light from the roof glinting on her glasses. ‘I want to start a group of women political artists. Your work fits perfectly. It’s so beautifully done, a lot of complexity there.’
I stare wide-eyed at her. ‘I…I’m…really?’
She sips her wine, keeping me in her gaze. ‘You don’t believe in your art very much, do you?’
Something shrinks inside me, that terrible doubt. ‘Militant Nostalgia.’ The dreaded phrase.
Gabriella looks puzzled.
‘Just some feedback I got.’ I swill the wine in my cup. ‘The images are hackneyed; they can no longer have any impact. It’s pure self-indulgence, you know?’
‘We live in a very jaded age, don’t we? Nothing shocks, nothing is new. It’s very hard to be ground-breaking, my work is no more so.’
I remember how I thought the images on her Facebook page weren’t especially original, but it didn’t stop me admiring her work.
‘I find it hard not to think that I’ve been wasting my time,’ I say weakly.
‘What better use of time can there be? How much poorer would we be without our creativity, our soul-food?’
I think about the buzz I’ve had at times with my work, how it was when I first got the studio. Taking my dancing Greenham women and weaving them as negative space through collage of destruction and exploitation. Feeling I was onto something new as I constructed barbed wire dresses cut through to reveal the same collage.
‘Oh, there are creative highs. But that doesn’t mean it has any intrinsic value.’
‘It has value when it connects with others.’ Gabriella’s tone is impatient. ‘You felt it in the exhibition just now. I felt it with your work.’
I stare into my cup. I am excited that she includes my work as an example of the power of art. But still the doubt looms huge.
‘I do know what you mean, and I sense it with your work too.’ I look again at the image on the easel. ‘And I have felt poorer, as you say, when I’ve had no creative expression. But, to tell you the truth, I feel these past couple of years could have been better spent supporting my son.’
‘Ah, the Old Mother Guilt.’
I grimace. ‘I do get the feminist line. But my son just walked out on his eighteenth birthday. No contact, no nothing. I pushed him too hard, he dropped out of sixth form, all I’ve done is go on at him.’
