Celebrating and collaborating with archived women’s art
File Under Female is a collaborative project created by award winning Chesterfield artist Bella Milroy, Artist in Residence at the Women’s Art Library Goldsmiths, University of London and is set to come to Chesterfield Library at the end of October.
The project, supported by the Women’s Art Library, Derbyshire Library Service and Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals and sponsored by Arts Council England, evolved during 2017 into an exhibition, publication and creative exchange event produced from her residency at the Women’s Art Library. It explores and celebrates the inspiring qualities of women artists’ archives made compelling by additional hand written texts and drawings found on top of, next to and along-side archived materials. Milroy’s artwork reveals how discovering such unseen elements brings fresh insight into the careers and lives of those women artists and opens new ways of thinking about her own.
The exhibition at the Kingsway Corridor, Goldsmith’s University of London 12th October – 3rd November 2017, presents Milroy’s original artworks along with publications co-produced with The White Pube and graphic designer Keir Mucklestone-Barnett.
These works explore and respond to the unique archived documentation of the diverse work of women artists from around the world held by the Women’s Art Library. The accompanying publications will also be exhibited in all public libraries in Derbyshire and distributed to be accessible to all libraries across England during national library week 9th – 14th October 2017.
The exhibition comes to Chesterfield Library on the 27 October. A representative from the project says:
“We are really excited by this Chesterfield event, seeing it as an important element of the whole project, and a way of acknowledging important regional creative work. We are interested in its continuation, extending the partnership and the possibilities that can support local creative work that might emerge from this, including the development of a local women’s art archive with a relationship to the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University of London.”
