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"Look, aren't there any housewives here who want to make some art, and who are fed up with all this fine art business? Aren't there any of you making things at home that you'd like to show each other?"
- su richardson, quoted in Alexandra Kokoli's The Feminist Uncanny (2010)
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A pioneer of 1970s Feminist Art, Su RICHARDSON played a key role in revalidating craft as a fine art form and its potential as a means of disrupting the white cube aesthetic. Simultaneously celebrating, exploiting and subverting feminine craft skills such as crocheting and embroidery, Richardson's home-made objects stir the unconscious of domesticity and femininity and their mutual implications with humour and dexterity.
Richardson became known through her association with the Postal Art Event that took place in Britain in the mid-1970s. What started as a collaborative project to connect women in different cities through exchange of artworks in the post gradually evolved into a ground-breaking art project 'Feministo' and a series of exhibitions and installations around the U.K., including the acclaimed presentation 'Portrait of the Artist as Housewife' at the ICA, London in 1977.
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"As a contributor to two of the most important art groups of the 1970s – the mail art project Feministo and the feminist art collective Fenix – Su Richardson fundamentally challenged the art world of the 1970s. The works Richardson made as part of these groups, many using crochet, combine a pop art sensibility with incisive humour that pillory the domestic everyday."
- Dr Amy Tobin, Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge
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Su RICHARDSON in the studio.
Richardson’s D.I.Y. aesthetic took feminist art in the 1970s in different directions - fitting her art practice around motherhood, work and household tasks. Her use of crochet was deliberate - traditionally considered a woman’s skill that Richardson aimed to politicise and imbue with greater meaning. Artworks from this period were made out of self-reflection, with several pieces created for herself and friends. They were not intended as standalone, anonymous art objects to be ‘elevated’ into a fine art context and removed from the domestic and personal sphere.
Her humorously subversive aesthetic anticipated contemporary countercultures and movements that combined craft with street art, such as yarn bombing and guerilla knitting, and was a precursor to a younger generation of female British artists who combined visual puns with domestic objects, including perhaps most notably Sarah Lucas in her seminal works Self Portrait with Fried Egg (1996) or Pauline Bunny (1997). By injecting familiar household objects, like eggs, nylons and stiletto shoes, into art aided the process of defamiliarisation and what art historian Alexandra Kokoli has coined ‘undoing homeliness,’ destabilising the naturalised connection between women and the home.
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"PLACING THE EMBROIDERED, KNITTED AND CROCHETED WORK IN AN ART GALLERY WAS INTENDED TO CHALLENGE THE VALUE-LADEN DIVISION BETWEEN 'HOME' AND 'WORK', 'ART' AND 'CRAFT' […] THE ART GALLERY IS MAINTAINED AS A SPECIAL SPACE BY WHAT IS KEPT OUTSIDE OF IT. FEMINISTO DISRUPTED THAT STRUCTURE."
- ROZSIKA PARKER, THE SUBVERSIVE STITCH: EMBROIDERY AND THE MAKING OF THE FEMININE (2017)
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'Su RICHARDSON: Wonderwoman' has been arranged with the assistance of Joanna Gemes / L’Etrangere, London.
Su Richardson: Wonderwoman
Past viewing_room
![Su RICHARDSON Potted Thoughts, For Kate [Walker] on Mother’s Day Plant,, 1976 Cotton 10 x 33.5 cm circumference](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/richardsaltoun/images/view/573aa0d081f59f41cdc3db7d99f925eaj/richardsaltoun-su-richardson-potted-thoughts-for-kate-walker-on-mother-s-day-plant-1976.jpg)
