Village Raw - ISSUE 1

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