An artistic exhibition celebrating historic women of Nottinghamshire.
Celebrating women of importance and their disruption of social norms is what I love to do. What we now take for granted, they were denied. What we have, they fought for. They saw a problem and they acted.
Just like them, I am inspired to act. My form of action is to create works of art in their honour and to remember with gratitude all they did for the area I have made my home. And I’m not the only one.
I will be exhibiting my embroidered portrait of Helena Brownsword Dowson with other artists at the unveiling of a scale model of Rachel Carter’s sculpture called Standing In This Place. This community-funded sculpture will be placed in Nottingham City Centre to commemorate the lives of women working in the Midlands textile mills and those enslaved in the cotton fields of America and the Caribbean.
I feel honoured that my embroidery will be part of this important exhibition and you can find my portrait of Helena Brownsword Dowson alongside other contemporary artists working in cotton and textiles. The exhibition runs between September 20th and September 25th from 10.30 at Nottingham Society of Artists Gallery so make sure to visit and celebrate this beautiful blend of art and history.
Why Helena Brownsword Dowson?
I conceived the idea of celebrating local women of the recent past through my embroidery, firstly with Florence Paton and secondly with Helena Dowson. I intend to commemorate several other women in this series, too, and to raise awareness of their legacy through my art and social channels.
My choice of Helena Brownsword Dowson as a subject was not a result of the Standing In This Place exhibition but in my personal quest to commemorate key women of Nottingham and the East Midlands. My link to the exhibition is only through my use of textiles in my work and its link to Nottinghamshire’s historic past. It is interesting, though, that Helen Dowson can be connected to the textile industry in a direct way too - more on that in my next blog.
Votes For Women!
Despite boasting of a name that could make her the heroine of any classic work of fiction, Helena Dowson was made of flesh and bone. She certainly had plenty of backbone given that her political activism would have put her in harm’s way at a time when women were insulted, assaulted, and died for the right to vote.
Helena, or Nellie as she preferred to be called, was a natural choice for me to embroider because she was a Nottinghamshire local who became part of the national movement for the enfranchisement of women, more commonly known as ‘suffrage’. This alone would be enough to commend her, but she gave so much more. I can’t wait to tell you more about her extraordinary life in my next post.
Art Imitating Life
The Standing In This Place exhibition is going to be one for the memory box and you won’t want to miss out. Find out more about the exhibition here and follow along on my journey to craft a fitting tribute to Helena Dowson and other women from my area. You’ll not only get an artistic feast for the eyes you’ll find out more about past local women’s lives so we can hold them up as the heroes they undoubtedly are.