A total honour, Margaret Harrison visited us at Platform today, and gave us a copy of her brilliant Words and Texts 1969*2010. Harrison founded the London Feminist Liberation Art Group, her work has been exhibited all around the world, and remains as fresh and as challenging as when she first burst upon the scene. The first exbo of I Am A Fantasy was censored by the police in 1971 – it featured a comic-book superhero Hugh Heffner stuffed into a bunny girl costume amongst other images interrogating dress codes , sexuality and gender.
Margaret was visiting today to gift an amazing piece of work made earlier this year on RBS by her partner Conrad Atkinson, who has been talking with us about the oil sponsorship of the arts issues. Both artists have a number of artworks in the Tate collection.
Text from image: “pieces of wall st being sold as souvenirs. Wall St declares a collective” Atkinson made this is 1989 – uncanny premonition.
It was a special honour to sit down and talk about art and politics, and the last forty years of it in this country – we realised just as she left that this had been somewhat of an intergenerational feminist chat, with myself, Jane Trowell and Margaret Harrison sitting around the coffee table with twenty years between us each. The conversation was a sharing of journeys and battle stories, of creativity and activism that would continue on.