International Women's Day - Representation for female artists in Britain

On Monday, 8 March from 3 pm, Dr McMillan will be joined by Maggie Ayliffe, Head of Wolverhampton School of Art and Laura Onions, lecturer in Fine Art also at Wolverhampton School of Art. The talk will be followed by a Q& A session.

Dr Kate McMillan, artist and author of the annual Freelands Report, 'Representation for Female Artists in Britain' will consider this research and other work she is doing to understand why progress for female artists in Britain is so slow. She will argue that Art Schools are a vital breeding ground for activism and must continue to empower young artists to set the agenda for change. McMillan asks whether collaborative, creative, community, placed-based models of care, so often championed by women, can offer solutions for the future.

Dr Kate McMillan is an artist based in London. She works across media including film, sound, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her work addresses a number of key ideas including the role of art in attending to impacts of the Anthropocene, lost and systemically forgotten histories of women, and the residue of colonial violence in the present. In addition to her practice, McMillan also addresses these issues in her activist and written work. She is the author of the annual report 'Representation of Female Artists in Britain' commissioned by the Freelands Foundation. Her recent academic monograph 'Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Empire of Islands' (2019, Palgrave Macmillan) explored the work of a number of first nation female artists from the global south, whose work attends to the aftermath of colonial violence in contemporary life. McMillan is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at King's College, London.

Following the talk and Q&A, we will be asking art school staff and students to respond to Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay 'Why have there been no great women artists?' from a contemporary perspective through a piece of artwork that can be shared with the online community. We welcome contributions from all creative disciplines. Further details will be shared in the session.

Register for the event here

Image credit: Kate McMillan installing 'Instructions for Another Future (my feet are ears), 2018 for the Rohkunstbau Festival, Scloss Liberose, Germany curated by Mark Gizbourne. Photography by Jan Brockhaus.