AN arts organisation is celebrating the impact of its women members over the past five decades with an exhibition featuring work by two of its founders.
Graphic Impact: Our Lives In Print features works by Jacki Parry and Sheena McGregor, two of the eight Glasgow School of Art graduates who founded Glasgow Print Studio (GPS) in 1972. Running throughout Women’s History Month, the exhibition includes pieces from the studio’s archives by artists such as Ashley Cook, Sam Ainsley, Christine Borland and Elspeth Lamb.
The archival works were each selected by seven artist members of GPS including Helen de Main, Drew Mackie and Maia Ronan as well as members of local organisations. This “print panel” then used the piece they’d chosen as inspiration for a new etching or a screenprint of their own.
Kerry Patterson, the studio’s archive curator, says Graphic Impact shows the works of professional artists alongside those of members of GalGael, a community group based in Govan, and Platform, the arts centre in Easterhouse.
The exhibition, she says, is one element of a project funded by the William Grant Foundation. In June, an open day will launch a new online oral history resource comprising interviews with key figures from GPS’s early days to 1989. “I had done some of the interviews by the time the print panel first met,” Patterson said. “When people came in, I played them some excerpts. That influenced a lot of people, such as Helen de Main, who is especially interested in the archive of work created by women.”
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De Main selected Josi In The Wind, a lithograph GPS founder member McGregor created in 1975. In a new screenprint titled Rag Boxes & Baby Bouncers, de Main brings together photographs from the archive, such as a joyful image (left) of Jayne Taylor using the Eagle Press in the studio’s Ingram Street base in the 1980s, with anonymised quotes about bringing children into the workshop.
“The number of women who said what a challenge it was for them to keep using the studio once they had young children to care for struck me,” De Main says. “Printmaking is a practice that requires commitment to spending time in a workshop environment, something that is not always compatible with raising a family.
“The images in the print, selected from the archive, are not of the women whose voices are depicted. However, for me, correlated with some of the sentiments articulated, feelings of distancing and isolation as well as collective strength and dogged determination.”
Putting community groups together with professional GPS members such as De Main was an opportunity for both to learn from each other, says education officer Sarah Stewart.
“A lot of people were keen to see the archive – there’s over three and a half thousand works in it,” Stewart says. “One member from Platform was overwhelmed by the volume and quality of the work and what she was learning from the project. She stuck with it and ended up making a fantastic print.”
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As Patterson assembled the archive and Stewart used the materials in education projects, they began to notice a relative lack of work by women and gaps in recorded history, especially from the 1970s.
Unusually egalitarian for its time, the GPS was founded by four men and four women art graduates. Although the Glasgow School Of Art ran a respected print-making course, there wasn’t a facility for making prints after graduation.
“Pretty soon after it was set up, the Print Studio began to run classes of its own,” Patterson says. “This was massively important – you didn’t have to have gone to art school to do a course. Some people, such as Joe Urie, went on to have careers as artists. He didn’t go to art school – he just saw an advert in The Herald asking people to come along.”
In an era of cuts, it’s an ethos GPS strives to continue. “There’s a wide range of backgrounds, ages, experiences and abilities in our membership, with people often joining after they do a course here,” Stewart says. “You can become quite isolated as an artist and learning how to use a professional workshop is a great confidence-builder.”
Until March 29 (not Mondays), Glasgow Print Studio, Trongate 103, Glasgow, Tue to Sat 10am to 5.30pm, Sun 10am to 5.30pm, free. Tel: 0141 552 0704. www.gpsart.co.uk
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