Village Raw - ISSUE 1
Village Raw is a magazine that explores cultural stories from Crouch End, East Finchley, Highgate, Muswell Hill and the surrounding areas. The magazine is created by the community, for the community. If you like this issue you can support the project through a subscription or donation. See the links below. The first issue of Village Raw magazine includes: WOMEN ONLY - Female artists explore the role women have played in Highgate’s history. CRAFTING THE FUTURE - Local crafters championing handmade products. VILLAGE SOUNDS - Q&A with local musicians Gabriella Swallow and Luke Eira. CREATIVITY IS POWER: Rickardo Stewart discusses youth provision and outreach. IN LIMBO: Photographer Dan Bridges captures the essence of Hornsey Town Hall. AN UNDERTONE OF HARMONY - Chriskitch’s Chris Honor discusses harmony. WALK AND TALK (AND EAT) – The Walk and Talk Club. THE HERBAL HOME - The herbal essentials that every home’s medicine chest should have. THE LAST STRAW - N8’s war on single-use plastic. NOT YOUR USUAL SALAD - A recipe from the Sustainable Supper Club. VILLAGE ESSAY - Mina Aidoo writes On Being Human: Learning to Feel Again. AND MORE…
Village Raw is a magazine that explores cultural stories from Crouch End, East Finchley, Highgate, Muswell Hill and the surrounding areas. The magazine is created by the community, for the community. If you like this issue you can support the project through a subscription or donation. See the links below. The first issue of Village Raw magazine includes:
WOMEN ONLY - Female artists explore the role women have played in Highgate’s history.
CRAFTING THE FUTURE - Local crafters championing handmade products.
VILLAGE SOUNDS - Q&A with local musicians Gabriella Swallow and Luke Eira.
CREATIVITY IS POWER: Rickardo Stewart discusses youth provision and outreach.
IN LIMBO: Photographer Dan Bridges captures the essence of Hornsey Town Hall.
AN UNDERTONE OF HARMONY - Chriskitch’s Chris Honor discusses harmony.
WALK AND TALK (AND EAT) – The Walk and Talk Club.
THE HERBAL HOME - The herbal essentials that every home’s medicine chest should have.
THE LAST STRAW - N8’s war on single-use plastic.
NOT YOUR USUAL SALAD - A recipe from the Sustainable Supper Club.
VILLAGE ESSAY - Mina Aidoo writes On Being Human: Learning to Feel Again.
AND MORE…
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ART AND CULTURE<br />
WOMEN ONLY<br />
Highgate’s history is a story of male success<br />
and greatness – but what about the women?<br />
Words by Alicia Pivaro<br />
Words and photo by Dave Reeve<br />
PHOTOS: COURTESY HLSI ARCHIVE (OPPOSITE PAGE AND TOP RIGHT), DAVID REEVE (THIS PAGE).<br />
The unveiling of Gillian Wearing’s statue of Millicent Fawcett in<br />
Parliament Square is one of hundreds of events commemorating<br />
the anniversary of suffrage for women in 2018. For the Highgate<br />
Festival (5-10 July 2018) a small group of local female artists<br />
are producing new works and installations to celebrate the life<br />
of historical female figures connected with Highgate. In collaboration<br />
with the Remarkable Women of Highgate project, coordinated<br />
by curator Catherine Wells of the Highgate Literary and<br />
Scientific Institution (HLSI) Archives, each artist has selected<br />
a woman that resonates with her personal and professional experience.<br />
By locating the works in different venues and spaces<br />
around Highgate, the exhibition is driven by a commitment to<br />
make the memories and past lives of these women real in our<br />
environment and community today.<br />
In a participatory and playful way, the project seeks to redress<br />
the male-centric imbalance in Highgate’s history. Many<br />
of these remarkable women lived multifaceted lives and fought<br />
against traditional ideas of the role of women. The impact of<br />
some of them resonated far beyond Highgate, while others added<br />
character and colour to village life. And the importance of<br />
how females have contributed to the cultural and civic life of<br />
Highgate still resonates today as several leading organisations<br />
are headed up by women.<br />
Stephanie Buttle, an artist who incorporates clay and performance<br />
in her practice has chosen to celebrate her next-door<br />
neighbour, Gretel Hinrichsen, now in her 90s. Gretel was the first<br />
to move into the modernist Southwood House Estate in the late<br />
Opposite page: Mary Kingsley.<br />
This page: Angela Burdett-Coutts (top);<br />
Portrait of artists (left to right),<br />
Bronwen Paterson, Stephanie Buttle,<br />
Alicia Pivaro, Helen Brough,<br />
Elizabeth Hannaford, Maria Kramer,<br />
Veronika Seifert.<br />
1950s and ran the Little Shop on Archway Road selling beautiful<br />
toys, books and instruments until the 1970s. “I wanted to explore<br />
Gretel’s long friendship with the artist Kurt Schwitters,<br />
with whom her husband was interred in the war, and her particular<br />
view of the world, in a piece that reappropriates some items<br />
from her domestic life, somehow connecting the two,” she says.<br />
Veronika Seifert, an artist who also runs the Halfadozen Studio<br />
on Archway Road, is using Christina Rossetti’s fruitily feminist<br />
poem Goblin Market as her starting point, while Jane Tankard<br />
is focusing on the story of mothers forced to give up their<br />
babies at St Pelagia’s House on Highgate Hill.<br />
Mary Kingsley, the only Highgate woman celebrated with a<br />
blue plaque, has been chosen by three artists. Elizabeth Hannaford,<br />
who has travelled extensively in Africa, and fine artist-printmaker<br />
Bronwen Paterson, originally from South Africa,<br />
have both responded to Kingsley’s love for the landscape, people<br />
and nature of Africa. Once ‘freed’ from her family responsibilities,<br />
Kingsley embarked upon her extraordinary journeys<br />
through tropical west Africa documented in her best-selling<br />
books, which are filled with humour and humanity. Artist Helen<br />
Brough wanted to base the whole project on her hilarious response<br />
when asked why she was not travelling with a husband:<br />
‘I am actually looking for him!’<br />
“Responding visually to this quote, the work I am investigating<br />
is anchored in the imagery of dense African forest and the<br />
imagined silhouette of this brave women forging onwards,” says<br />
Brough. “Not quite sure where she is going but determined that<br />
the voyage is of value.”<br />
Another famous female, Angela Burdett-Coutts, the richest<br />
heiress in England at the age of 23, used her fortune to support<br />
many charities connected to the poor, children and animals,<br />
founded Columbia Road Flower Market, and was a pioneer<br />
of social housing. At 67, she married her 27-year-old secretary<br />
who was a member of Parliament. Artist/architect Maria Kramer<br />
picked her because “she was a mover and shaker in a man’s<br />
world and a radical thinker in so many areas”. Kramer is creating<br />
three-dimensional wire sculptures to reflect the many facets<br />
and impact of Burdett-Coutts’ life.<br />
Other participating artists including myself, Peggy Atherton<br />
and Julie Major have an ever-growing list of wonderful women to<br />
choose from: Jenny von Westhalen, Eleanor Marx, Radclyffe Hall,<br />
George Eliot, Elizabeth Siddal, Mrs Mellon Duchess of St Albans,<br />
Miss Matilda and Miss Emily Sharpe, Lady Gould, Dorcas Martin,<br />
Joan Schwitzer, Barbara Castle, and Felicity Sparrow.<br />
Catharine Wells is adding to the list daily and the ambition<br />
is that it will continue after the festival as an ongoing legacy to<br />
“wonderful lives wonderfully lived”. •<br />
Find out more at: www.highgatefestival.org<br />
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