The exhibition HER GROUND: Women Photographing Landscape was on exhibition from the 12 th July to the 31 st of August in Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, East London.
One of the big names in London, Flowers Gallery, took the risk of making a female-only photography exhibition combined with a sweet exhibition called Motherline, a group exhibition of ceramics, tapestry and printmaking, that explored the emergent expression of identity and memory, visibility and the unconscious, fantasy, myth and the uncanny within the sphere of female experience. Only female artists were included in both in both exhibitions.
Her Ground uses landscape as a thematic focus to consider relationships between genre and gender. The term landscape, a principle category in Western art, is used in relation to the visible features of an area of land, often depicting human relationships to place and the environment. This exhibition looks at the specificity of viewpoint, addressing the visibility of women’s narratives and perspectives in photographic images of the landscape.
Nine photographers working on the theme of landscape with a very broad perspective, showed the complexity of social, anthropological, economic issues and relating nature with the body, the financial with gender conflicts, the virtual with mythology. The work opened up new questions and perspectives.
Something that was a bit surprising being a group exhibition is that there were no names on the walls. Every piece with its space stands on its own, allowing the audience to fill in the gap as if the works were part of something bigger. The decision was meant to “force” the audience to be a bit active. There was a list with all the names of the photographers with information of each work and a little picture next to the text. The decision worked and most of the people were checking, looking for each image and were reading the information given.
I only saw one gap. I would have liked seeing more diversity, I really miss other points of view inside western culture.
© Flowers Gallery
