It hasn’t changed: and babies?

The British artist Margaret Harrison (b. 1940) examines the female condition in patriarchal society. Her drawings, paintings and installations explore the traditions, narratives and attitudes that shape women’s subaltern position in relation to men. Specifically they consider the gendered dimensions of the workplace, domestic environments and lifestyles, art history, and pop culture through the lenses of sex and violence, challenging these social structures and apparatuses for their complicity in sustaining androcentrism.

The act of looking has always been both subject and strategy in Harrison’s production. Some works combine delicately drawn or painted fragments of imagery sourced from pop culture and art history to create visual and verbal puns that turn the oppressive male gaze back on itself. Other works fuse household materials with texts and documents as incontrovertible evidence of male supremacy. All the works assert the feminist maxim that ‘the personal is political’.