Mothers, Art and the Inner World: Women Artists Reclaiming their Creative Birthright

Readers, would be happy to have your thoughts on this, whether on this site or on facebook.
I am proposing to publish a book based on the most popular article in the Daily Fugue, which is Sex, Art and the Inner World: Women Artists Reclaiming their Creative Birthright.
This article has had four times more page views than the next most popular, which is my exclusive interview based article on artists Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie- also a very popular article, and my short article on Tracey Emin, also with many page views.
I am wondering is it because the word Sex is in the title?
And also the word combination Sex, Art? This would be an inaccurate impression in fact, as the artists are making art about them selves, and their self based experience, of their inner world, and in the examples in the article using themselves as the models for their figurative nude studies.

However some of the artists I wrote about do make art about sexuality from a female perspective, their own, for example Del Kathryn Barton and Tracey Emin. It is part of life, and the life of the inner world, that women have discussed openly in public forums and in art and writing since the women's art movement of the 1970s. It is a sign of health in a culture and society that women can do this openly, and that it is taken seriously. So that is a good reason to publish in this area.
What are your thoughts on this topic?

Meanwhile working title of the proposed publication is "Mothers, Art and the Inner World: Women Artists Reclaiming their Creative Birthright". This will cover contemporary women artists, mothers and non mothers, whose focus is on identity, subjectivity and the self.

All the best,
Ruth

Interview: Tracey Emin and Ruth Skilbeck

In interview: Ruth Skilbeck & Tracey Emin at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2004  

                                                                                                            
                                     Photograph © Copyright Ruth Skilbeck


Professor Tracey Emin and Ruth Skilbeck pondering the art of travelling light in 2004. 


In the photo I am interviewing Tracey Emin, who at the time was attracting media epithets such as  'bad-girl' of British Art, and 'Britain's biggest art celebrity'.


Tracey came to Sydney in 2004 for the opening of her exhibition, Fear, War and the Scream at Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.


Tracey's stories of her adolescent experiences of rape and racial abuse, transformed into the material  form of her art catapulted her into the upper echelons of the art world when she was picked up out of her struggling artist's life in an East End council flat by Charles Saatchi. Achieving cultural and political prominence in the 80s, Saatchi, is the advertising agency director who advised the Thatcher government, then turned to contemporary art. In the mid-90s Tracey Emin became one of  Saatchi's  curated group of Young British Artists, that also included Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers. No longer so 'young', their work continues to be represented by Jay Jopling in London's White Cube gallery.


Sitting in the sun on the terrace of the gallery, we were talking literally and metaphorically about 'the Art of Travelling Light'. A stream of consciousness that began when I asked her about how she flies. We devised a story concept of Tracey Emin's Art of Travelling Light -with tips on how to fly aesthetically with minimal baggage- or in Tracey's case designer luggage. Above the detritus of relationship breakdowns, addictions, life's crises. With friends and other animals (Tracey had a much loved cat); through the transformed subjectivity of art.


An alchemy that seems even more apt now.






© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck 2011




My story 'Tracey Emin Down Under' is published in POL Oxygen-Design, Art, Architecture, Issue 2, 2003.