The Milky Way (2021)
By
The Women’s Art Activation System
Image description: colour photograph, interior. Two white men, one in a black suit, one wearing a rucksack and patterned top. both wearing masks, appear to be talking together in front of Tintoretto’s ‘The Origin of the Milky Way’, a large painting in a heavy gold frame on a red wall at the National Gallery in London. To the right of the image is a white woman in patterned blue clothing looking at a game-board in her hands. Image credit: Catherine Harder Photography: https://catherineharder.myportfolio.com/portfolio
A breastfeeding-in-paintings game at the National Gallery London - commissioned as part of the Social Art for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (SAFEDI) project by Axis / Manchester Metropolitan University.
The Women’s Art Activation System (WAAS) is an artist collective that aims to activate women’s art. Principal artists Sharon Bennett and Sarah Dixon collaborate to make live art, performance and socially engaged works.
In August 2021, The WAAS were commissioned by an AHRC funded consortium of Manchester Metropolitan University, Social Art Network and Axis for Social Art for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (SAFEDI).
For research we explored the National Gallery with participants including women in pregnancy, a grandmother, a doula and women with new babies. We devised a game-activity for National Gallery visitors to play - with a board, stickers and a map of the paintings featuring breastfeeding around the Gallery. As participants find the paintings, they place a sticker on the board. It takes about an hour.
We also had participants who have not or are not experiencing reproductive labour who took part in the game. We invited people from a range of social positions, including the Director and some of the Trustees and staff of the National Gallery.
The Milky Way opens a portal into a new way of experiencing the National Gallery collection - a new way of seeing the art and the world. We want to explore what other portals might be opened, and who for?
To read a report on The Milky Way, scroll through the document below:
“The work WAAS made at the National Gallery kept me moving between the sticky body, kitsch sugary chocolate and the heavens. The smallness of the stickers, the tactile memory of stickering was such a long way from the permanence and grandeur of the artworks on show. It gave me a sense of ownership, like I was on a secret mission that was mine and not to be messed with.”
“I talked to a lot of people about breastfeeding, something that it is usually hard to talk about, especially to strangers. So it easily becomes a taboo topic - and yet it was fine discussing it as something that is relevant to people for many different reasons.”
“I’d love for the National Gallery and other museum collections to consider how their choice of what goes on show from their collections, how it is interpreted in keeping with current audiences, can be much more accessible to different demographics, and how social artists can help with this process.”
“Generally conversations around women representation in museums has focused on nudity and lack of female artists. This piece brought a new perspective around motherhood that felt incredibly important in the wider dialogue around representation. ”
More information: https://thewaas.org/index.php/portfolio/the-milky-way/
