A celebration of women's art

As Glasgow was staking its claim as European City of Culture, a collective of female artists took over an empty tenement at 390 Ardencraig Road in the scheme on the southern fringes of the city to make a bold statement.

Involving local women and children, their strident political and social messages were seen in a collection of contemporary art the city had never seen before.

Acclaimed at the time as a massively important community arts initiative, it was the launch pad for cutting edge artists such as Cathy Wilkes, who went on to win the Turner Prize, Rachael Harris and Julie Roberts.

A hall cupboard was stacked high with shoes, a bath was filled with coal, a kitchen was transformed into a testimony to the tedium of washing-up, A Girls' Night Out featured 3-D self-portraits of Castlemilk women and the close was decorated in red, with women-at-work signs and the slogan "Jobs for the Girls".

Now it is to be celebrated in new work by environmental artist Kate Davis for Generation, a nationwide programme of exhibitions to celebrate 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland, with a show at Glasgow Women's Library opening on October 18.

House Work Castle Milk Woman House (Part 1) will feature films as well as oral history and Kate's own interpretation of the 1990 project in a new installation.

"When the announcement was made that Glasgow was going to be City of Culture a few women in the city at the time thought, 'If we don't programme a festival of some sort or other it's likely that it will be guys representing Glasgow's culture'," remembers Dr Adele Patrick, lifelong learning and creative development manager of Glasgow Women's Library, who was involved in setting up Castlemilk Womanhouse.

"It's difficult to imagine now but at the time it was very much the Glasgow Boys in areas such as literature, comedy or the visual arts. It's not that we were opposed to men it was more we thought it would be great if women were also recognised as contributing to Glasgow's culture.

"And we wanted to make sure that local women were involved in the festival in one way or another."

Castlemilk Womanhouse was based on the groundbreaking Womanhouse set up in California by artist and writer Judy Chicago in 1972.

Adele adds: "I had been really impressed by the California Womanhouse, that real feminist art landmark, and naively and ambitiously I just thought, 'We could do something like that in Glasgow and it would be a really amazing art initiative for 1990'."

A call was put out across the country for women artists to offer ideas on work they could make at Castlemilk Womanhouse, then the proposals were put up on the walls of the empty rooms for local women to make the final decision.

"Claire Barclay, a well known Scottish artist who went on to represent her country in the Venice Biennale a few years ago, used the bathroom to make a statement about working class women's lives - she filled the bath with coal," says Adele.

"I was surprised that local women chose some of this work because it was challenging. Julie Roberts used a bedroom to do really beautiful, exquisite drawings on the wall of obstetric and gynaecological apparatus.

"We were thinking, maybe the local women will be more interested in work that is more obscure or abstract but it is just brilliant that people defy your expectations."

Now, more than 20 years on, the Castlemilk project is seen as a crucible for a lot of the most significant women artists working in Scotland.

Academic researchers regularly trawl through the archive at Glasgow Women's Library for work on the project and it is now seen as a significant historical part of the city's cultural heritage.

"We thought it would be more interesting than us showing the archive to ask a contemporary woman artist to use the Womanhouse as the springboard to make a new artwork of her own," says Adele.

"We asked Kate Davis, who we really admire and somebody who works on the history of women in art and is a well regarded artist in her own right, to look through the archives.

"She has made artworks that almost are an archival project in their own right."

THE volume of material available means this has become a two-part project for Kate, who has also curated a series of film screenings at Castlemilk Community Centre on October 18.

"When Kate was interviewing the women who were involved in the project, one of the overwhelming impressions she got was of the labour involved," says Adele.

"For her the feminist interpretation was that this was a hidden part of art: the work involved in it.

"A lot of the women were maybe not getting paid, juggling childcare, housework, a lot of the issues that were hidden from art history. When you think about art history you think about working in a garret, not earning a lot of money but having quite a bohemian life.

"This is the opposite, it is about grafting and dealing with all the issues women have to deal with."

n House Work Castle Milk Woman House, at Glasgow Women's Library, 23 Landressy Street, Glasgow, from October 18 to December 18.

angela.mcmanus@eveningtimes.co.uk