Women’s Art Register 50th Anniversary
Opening Speech 6 March 2025.

The Women’s Art Register is a legend in Melbourne and in Australia, it claims to be one off the longest running visual arts and document archive of Australian women artists and those identifying as women, in the world. That is some achievement. This year represents the Register’s 50th Anniversary, and these two exhibitions mark the beginning of the celebrations that will continue throughout the year long program of events.

Meredith Rogers work opens the exhibition. A wall of uniformly sized stitched works each documenting one year of the artist’s life experience from her early childhood to the present. Meredith’s work holds the exhibitions together in some respects as she demonstrates an art- as-life feminist methodology.

It’s wonderful to see Janine Burke’s portraits of Elizabeth Gower, Sue Ford, Lesley Dumbrell and Jenny Watson that she first published in her book Personal View in 2011. Janine’s photographs are shown here with Virginia Coventry’s classic black and white suburban house and Anna Sande’s series Hardtimes. Sande’s work has been overlooked by art history probably because the social documentary genre didn’t survive well in Melbourne under the rhetoric of postmodernism.

Virginia Coventry, Isobel Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Elizabeth Gower, Bonita Ely, and Erica McGilchrist are now part of a national roll call of great Australian women artists. They are acknowledged as significant contributors to the feminist art project internationally and collected by major museums. They exhibit here as long-term members of the Women’s Art Register alongside mid-career, younger and emerging artists, activists and archivists who have volunteered at The Register over the last two years and kept the archive alive. Together they create a feminist inspired curatorial approach.

The Women’s Art Register is a not- for-profit organisation run by volunteers and it embraces a collective governance that relies on negotiation, consensus and collaboration.

What I found compelling when I was involved in the Women’s Art Movement in Adelaide in the 70s and early 80s was the way in which it embraced archival work as a way of documenting the achievements of women. We need to keep on doing this work: collecting, exhibiting, recording and writing. Some of this may get neglected or lost but any art historian will tell you that archival work is full of surprises. Over and over again through decades and centuries things have been recovered. The work of feminist art historians demonstrates this. I’m currently helping a PhD candidate in Adelaide who is analysing The Post-Object Art Archive at Flinders University Museum of Art and engaged in a project to insert the women artists who were left out of the collection due to patriarchal bias or sexism.

It’s good to remember when we do our work that history is written in the present. We are actively engaged with making art history every day. And we now have the tools and the knowledge to go back and correct the historical record, to re-make that history. History is alive – it’s a living thing.

The methodology embraced by the Women’s Art Movements across the globe - to include all women artists regardless of established patriarchal markers of excellence has always been, in my mind, a powerful approach because it represents an inclusive feminism, one that has survived for decades. This still upsets some people, especially the mainstream which has a clear idea of the western patriarchal canon of art history and history in general. The Women’s Art Movements, in opposition and in rebellion, realised that there were many art worlds. They famously embraced women’s craft and all the ways of being and achieving as an artist in the home, on the streets, in the artist run initiatives and experimental art spaces, in the galleries and museums.

In the two parts of this exhibition, we see this practice of inclusion. Here established artists who have been recognised by the canon are exhibited alongside others who are emerging or who resist the canon and/or both, and others who have been over looked. There is an intergenerational give and take, a learning that is demonstrated and active.

Both the exhibitions have a reference to everyday life, the domestic, time, pattern and repetition. There are also works referencing the body, motherhood, and sexual identity that stress the entwining of the personal and political as a strong axis in feminist art practice. Motherhood has always been a strong feminist theme and it echoes through the generations of this exhibition beginning with Meredith Rogers’ stitched diary entries where mothering is entwined with her professional work, and continuing in Landmarks with photographs by Claudia Pharès and stitched works by Kirsty Gorter. This personal political approach has been a backbone for feminist art but it is by no means the only approach.

The ways in which the Women’s Art Register creates its history in this exhibition is worth noting because the feminist methodology is apparent in the curatorial practice and its propositions. On the tables installed in the Landmarks exhibition a history of organisations unfolds through works and their traces. The first table showcases workshops, ideas, games, and pedagogical ephemera from Women’s Art Register and the second table presents Sandra Bridie’s printed cards that detail the feminist events, festivals and exhibitions at the George Paton Gallery since 1974. [1]

The tables are a kind of hub in my mind as they entwine two histories and bring them together. As noted by other speakers this gallery has a deep history of supporting radical art and it was here that Lip magazine and the initial ideas about the Women’s Art Register were hatched.

The exhibition demonstrates how the trace and the document are in and around art. In the postgraduate works of Brianna Simonsen, Lisa Bellear the acclaimed first nations activist, photographer and broadcaster is celebrated as part of a series of portrait-collage posters that commemorate activist history.

Landmarks is curated by Merren Ricketson and Kirsty Gorter both of whom contribute work. Ricketson’s Education kit for ‘Flesh after Fifty’ is one of many pedagogical projects she has created and the commemorative poster by Kate Sfetkidis manages to include many traces of projects presented by the Women’s Art Register – the Aboriginal Art Kit, the Dinner Party event, the Monthly Cycle Game, the Women’s Gallery and more.

The Register’s history is in itself a rich and glorious contribution to feminism. It houses and protects a magnificent history and a living archive of Australian art representing 5000 artists. It is a great pleasure to officially launch the Women’s Art Register’s 50 th anniversary and to invite you to participate in the planned programs throughout 2025.