Women in Farming (art review)
posted by Philip
- Exeter Phoenix Arts and Media Centre, Bradninch Place (off Gandy Street), Exeter, until April 12
For Women in Farming, organised by Aune Head Arts, three teams of two women artists each spent time with three women farmers on Dartmoor. Obliged to stay on the farms for at least four weeks over the period of a year, their creative responses are now on show at the Exeter Phoenix. The resulting exhibition documents the lighter as well as the more serious aspects of the farmers’ lives. At its best, the show looks anew at everyday life to reveal the poignant truths underneath.
Maddy Pethick’s photographs are a mission statement. They show bemused farm animals inspecting a series of fragile sculptures of brightly coloured plastic farmyard detritus. A cow is totally unimpressed by a waist-high pseudo-constructivist tower made mostly from plant pots, while a sheepdog is more interested in dislodging a frisbee from it: we can imagine the sheer delight of being around such sometimes comical creatures. Their irreverence towards the sculptures indicates that Women in Farming is about an earthy, engaged artistic practice rather than ‘removed’ high art.
However, this also means that there is often an uneasy tension between the creative and the documentaristic. Penny Klepuszewska’s photographs, for instance, focus on the women farmer hard at work and dramatise the demands of the business. They work well, bringing us up close to the tough side of earning a living. Tot Foster’s cabinets, on the other hand, have a less concentrated impact. They are filled with prosaic objects related to stories of events in the farmer’s life, which we can listen to via headphones. Yet the link between this oral history and the installation seems strained. The works simply don’t develop the same artistic momentum as those that transmute the experience of farm life into art in a more hard-hitting manner.
Notable among these are Jennie Hayes’ large photographs. They introduce a vital sensuality into the exhibition and forcefully convey the intense contact the artists had with life on Dartmoor. Hayes photographs sheep close up, their wool luminous and palpable, or a horse in black and white, its sinewy frame all the more energetic for it. Alongside her vibrant pictures of controlled burning, undertaken to renew the fields for another season, they remind us of the cycle of life and death that underpins the agricultural and livestock economy.
Yet the uncontested stars of the exhibition are three works by Hayes and Louise Evans (sadly the only collaboration in the show). For these, Hayes has photographed the heads of three sheep, which seem so clean and textured they could be photorealist paintings. Paradoxically, it is the humanity Hayes has captured in their beatific expressions that is so arresting. All have plastic tags in their ears: marked by the farmer, we are told elsewhere, for being good mothers. Evans has remade these in gold-plated metal and presented them along with each photograph. Thus the throwaway labels become medals, capturing the transience of human-animal interaction in a simple and moving way.
Ultimately, Women in Farming hence features a varied range of responses to an intriguing project.
(image: ‘Cockerel’. A photo by Jennie Hayes as part of Aune Head Arts’ Women in Farming project)
March 27th, 2008
