Anonymous Was A Woman

Julia Adelgren
Clara Adolphs
Chechu Álava
Penny Davenport
Rebecca Harper
Mary Herbert
Angela Lane
Joanna Logue
Gosia Machon
Heidrun Rathgeb
Alice Watkins
Marenne Welten

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own, 1929.

Anonymous Was a Woman is an exhibition of new work by women artists, celebrating the breadth and depth of female artistic practice. Organized by Brit Pruiksma, this group show draws together work by 12 artists from outside Canada. The exhibition takes its cue from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 text A Room of One’s Own, an essay on the social and economic disadvantages women have experienced across history, from lack of education to lack of financial independence. Woolf considers what this has meant for female creativity, positing that women have always been forced to seek success in the face of many obstacles and in the knowledge that their art might not even be recognised as such. “For most of history,” she writes, “anonymous was a woman.”

This exhibition honours the extent to which the position of women has improved since the days of forced female anonymity, while also acknowledging how far there is to go. Women artists invariably face specific challenges, from childcare arrangements to hidden emotional labour; multi-tasking is a common modus operandi. These artists employ complex, multifaceted approaches to their practices, which are manifested across a variety of media from oil to pastel.