![\"The](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/eb495e7cb8c98efeb17ac989b962d621e1e8f061/123_28_4938_3422/1000.jpg\")
\n Joanna Moorhead writes for the Guardian, mostly about parenting and family life
","uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/lists/tag/profile/joannamoorhead","smallImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/contributor/2014/5/24/1400925778122/Joanna-Moorhead.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d7230ee3ce138a7d1d88f6accd6b3c8e"},"largeImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Joanna-Moorhead,-R.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=b3edffcd4061460ea933910b36328c4a"}},"cards":[{"title":"And this one shows the police evicting me: the fabulous fabric visions of Elizabeth Allen","rawTitle":"And this one shows the police evicting me: the fabulous fabric visions of Elizabeth Allen","item":{"trailText":"One of 17 children, she lived in a shack and devoted herself to needlework. Now her dazzling creations – showing everything from giant feet in Africa to the ‘fallen woman’ of Babylon – are being rediscovered","body":"Elizabeth Allen lived at the end of a steep, muddy track in a dilapidated hut with a notice on the door that read: “Knock very loudly.” One day in the winter of 1965, the artist Patrick Heron did just that – and overnight Allen, then in her 80s, became lauded as a luminary of the art world. There were exhibitions across Britain, not to mention in New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona. The Guardian called her “a remarkable colourist”, adding that “Klee and Matisse would undoubtedly have been impressed”.
\nOne of Allen’s pieces, 1966’s The Great Swan Song, reflects the surprise she felt at this flurry of fame after a life lived in total obscurity. This textile work features a black bird stitched into a cobalt-blue pond fringed by brown-leafed trees. The bird’s red eyes are gazing up at a vermilion sky, while a patchwork piece of bright green striped cloth seems to represent Allen’s hut.
\n\n Allen died in 1967 and her work was swallowed into the twilight as quickly as it had burst on to the scene. But now she has been unearthed anew, this time with a show at Compton Verney in Warwickshire that includes pieces that have been buried in storage or hidden away in private homes for almost half a century. There is also the first-ever public showing of a textile work entitled Autobiraggraphy. Its scenes include the day in 1934 when two helmeted police officers arrived to evict her – “wrongfully,” she has written on the reverse – from the Suffolk cottage where she had until then been living. In this brightly coloured image, we see red furniture rendered in felt, sewn on to an olive green lawn outside a pink house. A policeman leans out of one of its windows. Allen, known to her family as Queen, is gazing up in despair, wearing a floral skirt with a large black shoe peeping out from underneath. She had been born with one leg shorter than the other, and many of her works feature her orthopaedic footwear.
\nAutobiraggraphy also depicts Allen’s birth: the image shows an angel above a picture-postcard cottage, and a smartly dressed, bonnet-wearing woman arriving with a bunch of flowers. It’s a romanticised take on the truth: she was born above a baker’s shop in Tottenham, London, in 1883, one of 17 children of a German father and an Irish mother, both tailors. From them she learned to sew, and it may have been because she was unable to take part in dances that she devoted herself to needlework. Her parents’ workshop, filled with fabric offcuts and the paraphernalia of clothes-making, was her inspiration and her palette. Late in her life, she said: “A picture dawns as soon as I see a lovely piece of cloth.”
\n![\"Gave](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/327978e8b49fc3af162f721f2ff930fbe4127ade/197_81_4384_3561/1000.jpg\")
\n Much of her life story is unknown, but she would have been 51 when she lost her home in Suffolk, later moving into that shack outside Biggin Hill in Bromley, where she lived alone, making patchwork pictures using old clothes. She used a tailor’s thimble without a top, allowing for quicker stitching. When she read in a newspaper about a bankrupt textile business off-loading stock, she quickly sent off for ribbons, braids and trimmings.
\nDespite her reclusive lifestyle, Allen kept up to date with current affairs. As well as reading the paper, she listened to the radio. With the income from her sudden fame, in 1966 she bought a TV, only to return it two days later as she preferred the radio – easier to sew while listening, perhaps. Her work is testament to her connection to the outside world: the playfully titled 1965 work Lunar-Ticks Picnic references the space race between the US and the then Soviet Union. It shows an amiable-looking group of creatures gathered around a campfire seemingly minding their own business, suggesting the peaceful heavens above were no place for the overspill of earthly conflict.
\n![\"The](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ae8c393547205668f130c0e7b725ad4c1b2d4ed7/992_2408_1386_1225/1000.jpg\")
\n One of her most visually stunning and powerful works is The Black Feet Are Kicking, made in response to the independence of African nations from imperial powers such as Britain in the 1950s and 60s. A procession of appliqued black figures, adorned with sequins, march, or perhaps dance, against a cream satin background dotted with lacy hills. Dominating the scene, though, is a giant pair of black feet, while an eye peering out of a golden box in the sky above seems to suggest a transfer of power is imminent.
\nAllen had a curious relationship with religion. Late in her life, she recalled how she asked her mother why she had been born with a disability, and was told it was the sins of the fathers falling on their children. From that moment, she decided she did not want that God in her life. Later, her mother threw her out of the family home for being an atheist. And yet the Bible provides the inspiration for many of her pictures, including one of Jonah being swallowed by the whale, and another depicting the “fallen woman of Babylon” riding a many-headed beast.
\n“She seems to have been critical of the church as an institution,” says Ila Colley, folk art curator at Compton Verney. “But she definitely has a relationship to the Bible and that informs her work. One piece, Beetles Come and Go But Christ Remains Forever, is a reflection on celebrity.” It shows insects crawling up an altar cloth and was inspired by John Lennon’s statement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. “She was deeply suspicious of fame,” says Colley. One time after her “discovery”, she was irritated when a film crew knocked out the stove light as she was making tea.
\n![\"The](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/dbca96639c054a39dfe15f93e4de4afefe322e16/2264_1313_2987_2837/1000.jpg\")
\n It was the presence of a work by Allen in Compton Verney’s folk art collection that led to the exhibition. “Many artists, like Allen, have been marginalised,” says Colley. “And we want to see art in a more inclusive way.” Allen was a working-class woman who lived outside the norms of the art world. She wasn’t conventionally trained and had probably never visited a gallery. So she was barely even seen as an artist by art history. “Allen also lived with disability,” says Colley. “And that’s a big part of what she is making art about.”
\nAllen’s works would have been lost had it not been for Bridget, a young art student who lived near her in Biggin Hill. Her mother encouraged her to visit elderly neighbours. When she went to see Allen, she became fascinated by her work and her life, eventually going to live with her and help her. Bridget’s tutors, curious about these events, went to visit, later returning with Patrick Heron. Bridget, whose identity is being protected by Compton Verney, is now in her 80s: her letters from the time helped Colley to put the show together.
\nColley hopes the show will lead to the discovery of more works by Allen, and perhaps a better knowledge of her life. “It’s an investigative project,” says Colley. “We hope to have another exhibition of her art – but bigger.”
\n• Elizabeth Allen’s work features in Troublemakers and Prophets, at Compton Verney until 31 August.
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Now her dazzling creations – showing everything from giant feet in Africa to the ‘fallen woman’ of Babylon – are being rediscovered","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9d2b5743859aae197bbbf744d4b4411c6ba128ee/0_104_2000_1600/master/2000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=6e8c4df97584fb9e95c8e4d5a901f25f","height":1600,"width":2000,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Elizabeth Allen","altText":"In the Year of Grace 1961, artwork by Elizabeth Allen in The Autobiraggraphy, which showed events in her life.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Elizabeth Allen"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/13/fabulous-fabric-visions-elizabeth-allen?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/13/fabulous-fabric-visions-elizabeth-allen?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/13/fabulous-fabric-visions-elizabeth-allen?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Calling all sinners: for his latest work, artist Maurizio Cattelan wants people to confess","rawTitle":"Calling all sinners: for his latest work, artist Maurizio Cattelan wants people to confess","item":{"trailText":"Italian art provocateur to play priest in Catholic-inspired work that invites people from around world to be absolved","body":"“If you’re here to confess your sins, press one …”
\nThat’s the message awaiting callers to a special hotline from Thursday. But it’s not a digital Catholic church initiative for the Easter weekend: instead, it’s the latest intervention of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who scandalised some with his 1999 sculpture La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), which showed a lifesize Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite.
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\n To mark the 21st anniversary of John Paul’s death this month, Cattelan has made a limited edition of miniatures of his famous sculpture.
\nAlongside this, he is inviting callers from around the world to “confess their sins” directly – via a freephone US number or WhatsApp voice note for those elsewhere. Cattelan will then choose some callers to take part in a livestreamed event on 23 April, in which he will play the part of the priest and “absolve” callers from their sins.
\nSo is this an attempt to scandalise? Absolutely not, he said. “I don’t see it as absolution. It’s not religious authority, it’s a shared gesture. Confession exists in different forms everywhere – even outside religion.”
\nFar from intending to insult the papacy with his 1999 work, he said he had been “interested in showing fragility”. Some people, including some Catholics, saw the sculpture as representing the pope’s burdens; others believed it referenced the abuse and other scandals in the Catholic church’s recent past, and when it appeared at a museum in Warsaw, it was denounced as an attack on the church.
\nCattelan is known for creating blunt, almost cartoonish pieces – from a functional gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim in 2016 called America (later stolen while on display in Blenheim palace) to a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel in Miami in 2019, titled Comedian.
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\n Some of his work can seem sacrilegious, but he said his ambitions were much more ambiguous. He told the Guardian: “Catholicism is something you grow up inside, even if you try to step out of it. It’s belief, theatre, control, comfort – all at once. I’m not trying to defend it or attack it. I’m interested in the images it produces and the tension they carry. If someone feels offended, it probably means the image is still alive.”
\n\nCertainly, the Vatican seems not to have regarded him as a threat: in 2024 he was commissioned by the Holy See to create an artwork for its Venice Biennale offering. Cattelan painted a giant mural of soles – the feet kind – on the exterior wall of the women’s prison where the Vatican’s art exhibition was housed. “The fact that Pope Francis came to see the work … is more than a comment,” said Cattelan.
\nMazdak Sanii is chief executive of Avant Arte, the company marketing Cattelan’s pope miniatures. He said the confession idea is all about trying to reach new audiences: “We’re trying to make art more accessible both in terms of collecting art, and involving a wider public.” The miniatures, 30cm long and 12.5cm high, are made of hand-painted resin, and the papal staff is metal: each will retail for €2,200.
\n![\"An](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/664ec720ee27b50e3441e9f67fff52d762146c98/250_0_2500_2000/1000.jpg\")
\n There’s another provocation in the number of copies of the sculpture being made: it’s 666, which in the bible is associated with evil. “I like working with symbols people think they understand, and then shifting them slightly,” said Cattelan.
\nThe release of the edition is carefully timed: the sculpture’s title, The Ninth Hour, references the moment Christ died on the cross, which Christians across the world will mark this week on Good Friday. It is a time when Catholics traditionally go to confession: so what does Cattelan think callers will confess to on his hotline? He said he is expecting “a mix … some will play, some will be serious. The interesting part is when the two overlap: you don’t know if someone is performing or revealing something.”
\nWhat, then, would his own confession be? “That I trust doubt more than certainty,” he said. “And that irony is sometimes just a way to get closer to things without pretending to own them.”
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/x4ygn2","section":"World news","id":"world/2026/apr/01/artist-maurizio-cattelan-hotline-for-sinners","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/81763bcc777c00bac9f005ae9f3f8b0eb0a863e3/523_0_6647_5318/master/6647.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=075450ca0c1ca401001deca05f63852a","height":5318,"width":6647,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Maurizio Cattelan previously drew the ire of some Catholics with his artworks. Photograph: Photograph: Jonas Ekströmer/TT/Shutterstock","credit":"Jonas Ekströmer/TT/Shutterstock","altText":"Headshot of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan wearing a black hoodie and looking at the camera, not smiling.","cleanCaption":"Maurizio Cattelan previously drew the ire of some Catholics with his artworks.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Jonas Ekströmer/TT/Shutterstock"}],"shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"Italian art provocateur to play priest in Catholic-inspired work that invites people from around world to be absolved
","webPublicationDate":"2026-04-01T05:00:39Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#951c55","navigationDownColour":"#e02b7f","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e02b7f","headlineColour":"#ffffff","quoteColour":"#fdadba","standfirstColour":"#ffffff","metaColour":"#ffffff","dividerColour":"#aa4977","backgroundColour":"#951c55","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#FFFFFF","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#e02b7f","kickerColour":"#fdadba","colourPalette":"feature1"},"lastModified":"2026-04-01T11:10:48Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/world/2026/apr/01/artist-maurizio-cattelan-hotline-for-sinners","durationInSec":269},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ca0b9c7ec7ff8e4cdec5b319b9516b92c1d4459f/415_0_3890_3112/master/3890.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=37d30b5e85b81eb81419952c5989a2f1","height":3112,"width":3890,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"La Nona Ora depicts Pope John Paul II holding up a meteorite, which Cattelan said showed ‘fragility’. Photograph: Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images","credit":"Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images","altText":"A picture of a sculpture which depicts Pope John Paul II holding up a meteorite while lying on a red carpet.","cleanCaption":"La Nona Ora depicts Pope John Paul II holding up a meteorite, which Cattelan said showed ‘fragility’.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1b8ddcafb1a09c921ffcbd954f9d6453b7bf3fb2/326_0_2917_2334/master/2917.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=62f02b5aabff1c4364d2e09a7ff0b0ef","height":2334,"width":2917,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Cattelan’s solid gold toilet was stolen while on display at Blenheim palace. Photograph: Photograph: Jacopo Zotti (Guggenheim Museum 2016)/PA","credit":"Jacopo Zotti (Guggenheim Museum 2016)/PA","altText":"A solid gold toilet in a bathroom with a toilet roll dispenser on the wall.","cleanCaption":"Cattelan’s solid gold toilet was stolen while on display at Blenheim palace.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Jacopo Zotti (Guggenheim Museum 2016)/PA"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/664ec720ee27b50e3441e9f67fff52d762146c98/250_0_2500_2000/master/2500.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=6b1b97a62061a931f834209e895e7eb4","height":2000,"width":2500,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Comedian sold for $6.2m at a New York auction in 2024.In 1972, the mighty Kunstmuseum in the Hague bought three paintings by a little known British artist called Marlow Moss. The prestigious art gallery was keen to show the enormous influence of Piet Mondrian – the famous Dutch painter acclaimed for his black grids lit with bold blues and brash yellows – on such lowly also-rans as Moss.
\nYet, should you visit the Kunstmuseum today, you’ll find the Moss works positioned front and centre, while a similar piece by the great Mondrian, who would later become the toast of New York, is hidden behind a pillar. Why the volte-face? Because it is now widely recognised in the art world that it was as much Moss who influenced Mondrian as the other way round, at least when it came to the double or parallel lines he started using in the 1930s to add tension to his harmonious abstract paintings, one of which hammered last May for $48m.
\n\nSeven decades after her death in Cornwall at the age of 69, Moss is enjoying a major revival and reappraisal. As well as the current exhibition of her paintings and sketches in the Kunstmuseum, her sculpture will go on show at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin in April. Last year, meanwhile, her 1944 work White, Black, Blue and Red fetched £609,000 at Sotheby’s in London, double its estimate and a record for her work at auction. Not quite in Mondrian territory, not yet anyway.
\n![\"‘She’s](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/dc6dcdb5e10549a4822d1014332bb8d21163e8c8/0_0_5906_7399/798.jpg\")
\n It’s an extraordinary turnaround for an artist who was shunned by much of the art world in her lifetime. The Tate wasn’t interested in her. When Moss moved to Cornwall, settling in the beautiful and remote Lamorna Cove near Penzance, she made repeated efforts to contact sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her painter husband Ben Nicholson. They ignored her.
\n“Moss’s time has come,” says Florette Dijkstra, author of The Leap into the Light, a biography recently published in Dutch. “Art history is a strange science. The landscape can totally shift. The buzzwords today are inclusivity and diversity. Women artists are being promoted, as well as queer artists. This explains – partly – why Moss is getting so much attention.”
\nMarjorie Jewel Moss, as she was first named, was born in London in 1889. Drawn initially to dance and music, she went on to study art before moving to Cornwall, where she cut her hair short and changed her name to the gender-neutral Marlow, though was still known as “she”. In the late 1920s, Moss moved to Paris, where she became part of the avant garde scene and a member of the Abstraction-Creation group, which favoured abstraction over figurative work or surrealism.
\nHer entry into the group came via an early admirer, Mondrian, who was a few years her senior and Dutch. Moss had been introduced to him by her partner Netty Nijhoff, a writer from Zeeland. Moss and Nijhoff had met at the Cafe de Flore in Paris. When Nijhoff asked her son to take a note to the lady at the nearby table, the boy asked: “What lady?” Moss was, as usual, in male attire. After they became a couple, both would go about Paris in men’s suits and hats. Nijhoff remained married to her husband, the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff, for years to come, though both had other lovers. At times, Moss and Nijhoff had other partners as well.
\nThe reaction this unusual pair prompted wasn’t straightforward, says Dijkstra, even in the so-called liberal art community in Paris. “Some accepted them,” she says. “Others didn’t.” Mondrian did up to a point – but he was far more interested in Moss’s art than her love life.
\n![\"Marlow](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/f7055acbf58b371911980dfbb4223a1a4429b125/0_0_1593_3000/531.jpg\")
\n “He was impressed,” adds Dijkstra, “by her experimentation with the ingredients of ‘neoplasticism’ – how she used materials other than paint, such as cork and wood, and her use of the ‘double line’, which allowed for more dynamic compositions.” Mondrian has since gone down in history as the father of neoplasticism, which was all about paring art down to basic components, using only lines and shapes with minimal colours.
\nWhen Mondrian saw Moss was deploying the double line in a new way – not using it to cross other lines – his interest was aroused and he wrote to ask what she meant by it. When she told him she regarded the single-line grid he’d been using for over a decade as “a conclusion and restriction” to a composition, he replied saying he couldn’t quite follow what she meant.
\nMondrian, however, would go on to become famous for the double line. Clairie Hondtong, the Hague show’s curator, believes its use evolved from exchanges between the two, rather than as something Mondrian created that was then borrowed by Moss, as earlier art historians believed. “For a long time, he was seen as the instigator – but, though it’s unclear who used it first, we now know Mondrian was intrigued by Moss’s use of double lines.”
\nThe sands have certainly shifted over the years. Back in 1972, the assumption was that artists such as Moss had been influenced by Mondrian’s use of it. Then came the discovery that Moss had also used it – and the smart feminist money was on him having stolen it. But now, says Hondtong, there’s a new approach. “Many museums put Moss to the front in the originality debate, but we’re moving away from the ‘Who did it first?’ narrative, focusing instead on the interchange of knowledge.”
\nVisitors to the exhibition will be able to admire Moss’s use of the technique in her 1932 work White, Black, Red and Grey. They will also be able to compare it to Mondrian’s, in his 1937 Composition of Lines and Colour.
\nSome LGBTQ+ commentators have suggested that Moss’s use of double lines may have been her response to a world that didn’t make space for a gay woman who dressed in masculine clothes. Since her double lines didn’t cross other lines, she effectively opened up a new space on a canvas – one she may have longed for in the real world. “It might have been an expression of her search for freedom,” says Hondtong. “It could be interpreted as an original response for people outside binary spaces.”
\nHow does Moss fit into today’s transgender debate? “If she was alive today,” says Hondtong, “would she identify as trans? We can’t know – and we don’t want to put words into her mouth. It’s certainly great that she was seen as a pioneer and is an inspiration for queer artists today.”
\nIn 1940, Mondrian moved to New York. Moss, by then living in the Netherlands with Nijhoff, returned to Cornwall, since her Jewish ancestry made life impossible in now-Nazi occupied territory. Mondrian urged her to follow him, but she did not. He died there in 1944, and the two never met again. In Lamorna, Moss seems to have found acceptance and a place conducive to her work. After the war, she reunited with Nijhoff and the pair continued to be lifelong companions until Moss’s death in 1958. They split their life between Cornwall, Paris and the Netherlands, where they lived sometimes on a houseboat in The Hague.
\n![\"Intuitive](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/d07e91804451d17ca80f5b3850aa01309ef49e8b/0_0_3245_5100/636.jpg\")
\n New York, whose grid-like streets echoed Mondrian’s works, helped catapult him to global fame, and he has gone down as a giant of art history, one of the three greatest Dutch painters – along with Van Gogh and Rembrandt – of all time. He is regarded as a central pioneer on the journey from figurative to abstract art, and in the US his work connected with the jazz music and boogie-woogie of the time. In 2022, his Composition No II went for $51m, the record for a Mondrian.
\nMoss, by contrast, became a footnote in art history, a situation compounded by the destruction of much of her work when a house in Normandy where she and Nijhoff had lived was bombed by the Allies in 1944. It’s the discovery of a suitcase full of sketches that has prompted The Hague exhibition. “The case was left in the Netherlands,” says Hondtong. “It was acquired by the Kunstmuseum in 2025.” A lot of the works were undated, but it’s believed some are from the early 1940s. There are rare examples of her sketches, which reveal much about her thought process.
\n“We see her using mathematical calculations to plan her geometric paintings,” says Hondtong, “which is very different from Mondrian. She was very precise and her works were carefully mapped out, whereas Mondrian worked more intuitively.” Also in the suitcase are automatic drawings, revealing another layer of Moss’s oeuvre.
\nHondtong hopes the contents of the suitcase will spur a new chapter in the artist’s legacy, a focus on her work rather than her life story – an ambition supported by Lucy Howarth, author of the only book in English on Moss, a short eponymous biography. “Moss has a fascinating story. For most people, the way into knowing about her is via the Mondrian link. But she deserves to be explored in her own right. She’s been downplayed by Mondrian scholars for years, but she is one of the few top-tier non-figurative British artists from between the wars, and she was the only Briton and the only female artist who appeared in all five Abstraction-Creation journals.”
\nHowarth, a historian at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, has been researching Moss since the early years of the 21st century, and says much has changed. “In those days, I’d be looking for her work in storerooms and back rooms. Today, Moss’s work is up on the walls and much sought after for exhibitions.” The upcoming Berlin sculpture exhibition is co-curated by Howarth. “Moss worked in metal, stone and wood and we’ll have about 10 pieces,” she says. “But we’ll also have photographs of sculptures that were lost.”
\n![\"Piet](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/d21727901e69a7b37e12f3dd1d8ebe6b38f0b375/0_672_2712_2170/1000.jpg\")
\n Unlike Mondrian, who was a painter, Moss was a constructivist who used a range of materials and methods. The new show, it is hoped, will shift the focus on to that. Nijhoff once described her partner as an artist whose work was all about space, movement and light – and that’s every bit as true of her sculpture, says Howarth.
\nPerhaps most exciting of all is the idea that the current focus on Moss is reframing art history. For centuries, it’s been the story of singular men, geniuses who toiled alone brilliantly to change the direction of the canon. “We’re realising art history is a lot more interesting than that,” says Howarth. “Mondrian was an amazing artist, but he wasn’t the only one practising neoplasticism. It’s so interesting to find lesser-known artists and to examine their impact – and it’s no surprise to find many of them were women and/or queer. Their presence complicates the story. But it also enriches it – for all of us.”
\n• Marlow Moss: A Suitcase Full of Sketches is at the Kunstmuseum, The Hague, until 10 May. Creating Space: The Constructivist Marlow Moss is at the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, 2 April to 26 July
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/x432e6","section":"Art and design","id":"artanddesign/2026/jan/12/piet-mondrian-crossdressing-lesbian-artist-marlow-moss-cornish-cove","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cff8f524d53f17e7d17e7d44fee74dc6456b7f92/0_0_5000_4000/master/5000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c4edb469bc94b399f5f1e6d77a6395aa","height":4000,"width":5000,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"A Mondrian or a Marlow? … left, Moss’s White, Black, Red and Grey, 1932; right, Mondrian’s Composition (No 1) Gray-Red, 1935 Photograph: Composite: Alice de Groot/Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Heritage Images/Getty Images","credit":"Composite: Alice de Groot/Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Heritage Images/Getty Images","altText":"A Mondrian or a Marlow? … left, Moss’s White, Black, Red and Grey, 1932; right, Mondrian’s Composition (No 1) Gray-Red, 1935","cleanCaption":"A Mondrian or a Marlow? … left, Moss’s White, Black, Red and Grey, 1932; right, Mondrian’s Composition (No 1) Gray-Red, 1935","cleanCredit":"Composite: Alice de Groot/Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Heritage Images/Getty Images"}],"shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"Piet Mondrian found fame, fortune and glory with his grid-like paintings lit with basic colours. But did many of his ideas come from Marlow Moss? Our writer celebrates an extraordinary British talent who died in obscurity
","webPublicationDate":"2026-01-12T16:14:42Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#951c55","navigationDownColour":"#e02b7f","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e02b7f","headlineColour":"#ffffff","quoteColour":"#fdadba","standfirstColour":"#ffffff","metaColour":"#ffffff","dividerColour":"#aa4977","backgroundColour":"#951c55","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#FFFFFF","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#e02b7f","kickerColour":"#fdadba","colourPalette":"feature1"},"lastModified":"2026-01-13T02:30:50Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/artanddesign/2026/jan/12/piet-mondrian-crossdressing-lesbian-artist-marlow-moss-cornish-cove","durationInSec":669},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/dc6dcdb5e10549a4822d1014332bb8d21163e8c8/0_0_5906_7399/master/5906.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=114d31111aaa285ba25d7dbd3d40df15","height":7399,"width":5906,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"‘She’s now getting attention’ … Marlow Moss. 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But did many of his ideas come from Marlow Moss? Our writer celebrates an extraordinary British talent who died in obscurity","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cff8f524d53f17e7d17e7d44fee74dc6456b7f92/0_0_5000_4000/master/5000.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c4edb469bc94b399f5f1e6d77a6395aa","height":4000,"width":5000,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Composite: Alice de Groot/Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Heritage Images/Getty Images","altText":"A Mondrian or a Marlow? … left, Moss’s White, Black, Red and Grey, 1932; right, Mondrian’s Composition (No 1) Gray-Red, 1935","cleanCredit":"Composite: Alice de Groot/Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Heritage Images/Getty Images"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jan/12/piet-mondrian-crossdressing-lesbian-artist-marlow-moss-cornish-cove?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jan/12/piet-mondrian-crossdressing-lesbian-artist-marlow-moss-cornish-cove?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jan/12/piet-mondrian-crossdressing-lesbian-artist-marlow-moss-cornish-cove?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"The Hebden Bridge I know was always a place for Riot Women","rawTitle":"The Hebden Bridge I know was always a place for Riot Women","item":{"trailText":"As Sally Wainwright brings the West Yorkshire town back to our screens, a fellow local writer returns home and reflects on how it’s changed since she was a child","body":"Hebden Bridge has always buzzed with female energy. As a child I remember the feisty women behind the bar at the pubs where my dad used to drink, the punk-haired cafe owner and the redoubtable librarian always up for a noisy chat when we checked out our books. That was before it became known as the lesbian capital of the UK (my gay cousin from Australia once told me she was coming to Europe: “Hebden Bridge?” I asked. “How did you know?” she gasped).
\nNow the lass spirit of the West Yorkshire town is on display again, this time in Sally “Happy Valley” Wainwright’s new BBC One drama Riot Women, which tells the story of a group of women in their late 50s who set up a rock band.
\nLike me, Wainwright grew up in Calderdale; like me, she’s 62. So she too must remember the days when Hebden Bridge was more famous for its flat-capped eccentricity than its edgy coolness. At university (and spookily, Wainwright and I were both at York, though we didn’t know one another), I would regularly boast that I lived close to where poet Ted Hughes grew up (he was born in Mytholmroyd, just along the valley) and near to where his erstwhile wife and fellow poet Sylvia Plath was buried (Heptonstall, on the hill above Hebden Bridge). But I certainly didn’t dwell on the smoky, cramped pubs or the greasy spoon cafes or the unremarkable warehouse-like unbranded store where my mum bought the groceries. The town felt deeply frumpy back then.
\n\nThings are different today. I name-drop the Nisa Local on Crown Street, where my mum buys her Guardian, because in Happy Valley it’s where Neil, the partner of Catherine Cawood’s sister, worked in Happy Valley. More thrillingly, my mother’s flat is at the top of the street where Cawood (played magnificently by Sarah Lancashire) lived: the climactic final car park scene after James Norton’s character, Tommy Lee Royce, sets himself alight must have been visible from her balcony. And now the souped-up Albert, on Albert Street – one of my dad’s haunts in the 70s and 80s – has been transformed into the Duke of Wellington for Riot Women, with Lorraine Ashbourne, playing alongside Tamsin Greig and Joanna Scanlan, as the landlady.
\n![\"frontage](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/bd532d59e85f931e32a5e49c563eb88d4c18fda4/0_0_5000_3333/1000.jpg\")
\n Right now I’m having breakfast opposite the Albert, at a table in the sunshine outside Leila’s Kitchen, whose Iranian owner tells me it was the original vegetarian cafe of Hebden Bridge, set up in the 1980s. She’s run it since 2019, and her Persian breakfast – eggs, walnuts, feta cheese, salad and flatbread – is a renowned speciality, as is her noodle soup and saffron and pistachio ice-cream.
\nIn a town with a penchant for revolving doors and pop-up shops, one of the joys of visiting Hebden Bridge regularly is that it’s never the same twice. In fact, there’s currently another top-class breakfast venue, with queues heading down Valley Road while they’ve still got buns to sell: Mother, home of just-baked croissants including the almond one I tried. “It’s a bit hefty,” the assistant said as I pointed to it; in the event, I didn’t need another meal for the rest of the day.
\n\nIt’s quicker to say what has been constant rather than what’s changed since I was a child. The Town Hall, with its big green doors, is the same (though they certainly didn’t have art exhibitions and a cafe there when I was a kid). The rush of the river, fast-flowing through the town and whizzing under the packhorse bridge that gave the town its name, is a welcome constant. And the Picture House is still there: where once I watched Grease, Jaws and An Officer and a Gentleman, the BBC premiered Riot Women here last week, as a thank you to the locals who put up with weeks of filming last summer.
\n![\"old](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/0ccaf34e792063b5d050c0f72150ec193c53ccf4/0_0_4538_3678/1000.jpg\")
\n The shop I remember best from my childhood is Innovation – and it’s still here, the institution that relaunched this unfashionable Yorkshire market town into one of the quirkiest, and coolest, spots in the north of England. It was back in 1972 that a local legend called David Fletcher bought a disused mill in the centre of the town and turned it into the quintessential gift shop-cum-cafe, the business all the other shops that came after wanted to emulate (in terms of its longevity and success, anyway). The Trades Club was always there: a socialist members cooperative, the building owned by the Labour party, it’s become one of the funkiest live music and comedy venues in Britain. Sadly, Riot Women are a fictional band, but the October lineup included Grace Petrie (“the British folk scene’s funniest lesbian”), DJ Red Helen and Josie Long.
\n\nThe police station I knew on Hope Street is now an antique shop; the newsagent’s on the square (now pedestrianised) has become The Remedy, where you sit at high-up tables and taste a flight of wines, also available to buy. My sister’s old bank is Coin brasserie, where she and I recently reminisced, while sipping a delicious and reasonably priced bottle of fizz, about the ancient art of cashing cheques in the very room where she’d done just that. The cashier’s counter from my own former bank, round the corner on Market Street, has been moved to the shop next door which is full of rhubarb and ginger cake and strawberries and cream cupcakes: but they’re not baked goods, they’re bath time treats – it’s the Yorkshire Soap Company. They make scented candles too, and for Happy Valley they created a special edition – watch this space for a flaming Riot Women.
\nA few doors along is Heart Gallery, in what was a rambling antiques centre when I was a kid: today, its Scandi-style interior showcases locally produced artworks. Across Market Street is Earth Spirit: it’s the essence of Hebden Bridge, a place to buy spices and jams, colourful knitted berets and weave-your-own brooch kits. For the inner sanctum, head up the small staircase at the back for the incense-infused den of crystals and tarot cards, pictures of hares and goddesses, witches’ guides to hats and flowers, books of spells and handbooks on angels and sacred animals. And when you’ve chosen your tome, head to the Hermit on Hope Street, settle into the coven-like basement, dimly lit by strings of fairy lights, and enjoy a proper Yorkshire brew.
\nRiot Women is on Sundays, BBC One, 9pm.
\n• This article was amended on 14 October 2025. An earlier version said that the Trades Club was always a trades union club owned by the Labour party. In fact, the club is not affiliated with Labour, but is a socialist members cooperative in a building owned by the Labour party.
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I’m having a glass of inexpensive, decent wine in a waterside bar: and even on this picture-perfect night it’s quiet, with every customer around me speaking Dutch.
\nThis can’t be Amsterdam, can it? A city that’s overpriced, heaves with tourists, and is awash with busy canals and traffic. It feels a million miles away. In fact, the city centre is just 20 minutes up the road, because this is Nieuwendam, whose houses date from as long ago as the 16th century, built atop the dyke that kept the sea at bay from the pasture land that grew the crops to feed the city. I’m drinking in Cafe ’t Sluisje, which for the last decade has been run by local residents. This is the most scenic quarter of Noord, the Amsterdam on the other side of the water from Centraal station.
\nNoord is my home for the summer: my daughter and her Dutch partner live in Nieuwendam and I’m here to help with their baby, my first grandson. My childcare days are spent in leafy Noorderpark, or pushing the buggy through the shady woodland of Vliegenbos to the canal.
\nA century ago this was Amsterdam’s industrial heartland, and the streets are lined with the uniform, steep-roofed houses built for the workers. Today, almost in response to the excesses on display down the road, the area is flexing its hippy, alternative, laid-back side: my walks take me past floating homes, the occupants of one of which keep goats and chickens in a repurposed fire engine. In summer, lives spill out onto the pavements: most houses have tables, chairs, even sofas outside their front doors, and a sunny evening quickly becomes a convivial street party. Down by the water, sculptures by local artists peek through the long grass, and you can jump into the canal for a swim.
\n![\"Pllek,](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/a938f2b8db7051fada60bab6fc13038ba7d1bee8/0_0_5770_3847/1000.jpg\")
\n For visitors, nowhere sums up the vibe of Noord better than Cafe de Ceuvel, a former shipyard, now a collection of shabby-chic vintage houseboats permanently moored around a meandering boardwalk; they’re now artists’ workshops and a yoga studio. The cafe is a glorious, colourful hotchpotch of recycled furniture, with some tables right at the water’s edge – it’s the perfect place to while away an afternoon drinking organic beers and wine. And if you need somewhere to stay, the Ceuvel has rooms in moored boats – its Hotel Asile Flottant has doubles from about €150 a night.
\n\nNoord’s best-known area is another shipyard called NDSM, an open space larger than 10 football pitches that is home to myriad art galleries, museums and outdoor sculptures and installations. A free ferry transports you there in 15 minutes from Centraal Station – on the way, you get a good view of the futuristic, swan-like Eye Filmmuseum. This, along with the Nxt Museum of technology, are among the most-visited attractions in Noord. Also popular is Pllek, a collection of repurposed shipping containers where you can eat anything from a laid-back brunch to dinner, with meditation and yoga sessions and live music also on the menu. Movies are screened on its beach, which has stunning views over to the city.
\n![\"The](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/a5364154f2f597f4dcd880e6b144477217d88c34/197_0_7270_5816/1000.jpg\")
\n My advice, though, would be to venture a little further afield, to a street such as Johan van Hasseltweg, which stretches across the peninsula in the opposite direction from NDSM. This is the locals’ Noord, with its corrugated iron warehouses. Tourism is beginning to make its mark here, but only just: wedged between the long-established family businesses and garages are places such as Oedipus brewery, where you can try the citrusy, bestselling Bride, or the Pais Tropical, and which serves a melt-in-the-mouth smash burger. Nearby is Chateau Amsterdam, an urban winery and restaurant (open Wednesday to Saturday) where grapes from across Europe are used to make sauvignons and chardonnays, pinots and fizz. And at the very end of the street, where you’re again at the water’s edge, is another beach restaurant – De VerbroederIJ, with its own food garden and pigsty.
\nIf you want to push the boat out, you won’t need a boat at all: it’s a few minutes’ walk to Hangar, my favourite Noord restaurant. The food – mostly burgers and salad – and the wine are great. But it’s the ambience that makes it spectacular, with tables right by the water, and meals punctuated by giant barges cruising slowly by. Best of all, unlike many of the eateries in the “centrum”, it’s never packed.
\nAnd beyond the area’s cool restaurants and vibe is the countryside – surprisingly close since 2018, when the metro’s line 52 expanded, making Noord station just a four-minute journey from Centraal. Take your bike (you can do this at off-peak times) and within a few minutes of arriving, you’ll be pedalling through lush fields and picturesque villages. Pack a picnic, because there isn’t much in the way of bars and cafes out here. But as an antidote to the overcrowded city, it’s unbeatable.
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","cleanCaption":"A cafe on Nieuwendammerdijk in Noord, Amsterdam.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy"},"campaigns":[],"designType":"Feature","palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#BB3B80","main":"#BB3B80","secondary":"#FFABDB","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#951D7A","shadow":"#DCDCDC","immersiveKicker":"#FFABDB","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#BB3B80","kickerText":"#BB3B80","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#BB3B80","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#BB3B80","featureKickerText":"#FEC8D3","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#7D0068"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#FEC8D3"},"atoms":[]},"trailText":"A four-minute train ride from Amsterdam Centraal is an easygoing world of floating homes, art galleries and inexpensive waterside bars","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7cc63448a09ba83ffc39c54f5f692b627e518ee1/638_0_6660_5328/master/6660.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=fa83584579479465e247d8e16d75cd18","height":5328,"width":6660,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Ian Dagnall/Alamy","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/aug/14/laid-back-noord-antidote-to-amsterdam-crowds-netherlands?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/aug/14/laid-back-noord-antidote-to-amsterdam-crowds-netherlands?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/aug/14/laid-back-noord-antidote-to-amsterdam-crowds-netherlands?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"‘I’m scared and my work reflects that’: the artist painting heavy questions onto the lightness of silk","rawTitle":"‘I’m scared and my work reflects that’: the artist painting heavy questions onto the lightness of silk","item":{"trailText":"Across Europe, Emma Talbot’s striking works fill galleries with dazzling images and telling questions, all painted onto a rather unusual material. She talks us through her dark obsessions – and the tragedy that changed everything","body":"It might seem shocking, at first, for an artist to use her own children as models in a work based on Medea, a mother from Greek myth who kills her sons. “They noticed the likeness in my work,” says Emma Talbot. “And I had to say, ‘Yes, it’s you.’” Talbot, whose large-scale UK show has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, adds: “But when I think of ‘sons’, they’re the sons that come to mind. It was inevitable the images would be of them.”
\nThere’s another reason. The installation in which they appear – The Tragedies – is a tent-like, silk structure painted with intricate, swirling images interspersed with short texts: “Why should there be war?”; “Why fill the future with grief and regret?”; “What does war resolve?” These are the questions Talbot believes we should all be asking ourselves, at a time when the UK has been mooting the possibility of conscription. “It is a tragedy,” she says. “When they said that, I immediately thought of my sons, both in their mid 20s. It feels personal. These are my sons they’d be sending off to war.”
\n![\"The](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/3e4b138bf9bbe66260e8b729c0b4337439357577/0_0_7957_5306/1000.jpg\")
\n This is the point Talbot wants to make with her Medea piece. “Her crime was totally unthinkable – and yet is what Medea did worse than us sending our children off to die in war? I can’t see that any kind of war resolves anything.” Talbot, a descendant of Jews who fled 1930s Germany, adds: “People say, ‘What would you have done in the time of Hitler, or over Ukraine?’ And I say, ‘If we had a system that didn’t legitimate aggression, everything would be different.’ We can’t even imagine how that world would be.”
\n\nWar isn’t the only issue this show of fairly recent work tackles: Talbot uses paintings, sculpture and animation to examine other concerns, from our relationship with nature, to how grief affects our lives. Her paintings, all on silk, are colourful, closely packed with flowing imagery. They include a series called Magical Thinking, which explores the ways humans use imagination to make sense of the world. Sculptures include Gathering, which uses fabric, beads and wood to look at the symbolic properties of various animals. Her animation All That Is Buried shows a drawn figure navigating a soulless urban landscape in search of truth.
\nAt the root of her work are questions about power. Who has it? What do they do with it? How might they use it differently? The Tragedies has long arms reaching out: they’re warning figures, says Talbot, like the chorus of a Greek tragedy. “They’re calling on us to notice what’s happening – because humans have the capacity to explore complex ideas. That gives me hope: there is scope to find another way.” All the same, she finds the news now unsettling. “I’m scared and my work reflects that.”
\nTalbot was born in the Midlands in 1969: her mum was a nurse, her father, seriously injured in a car accident, was her patient. The marriage didn’t last long: Talbot’s dad moved to Japan, where he still lives, to raise another family. Her mum remarried, but it didn’t make for a happy childhood. “She came from this intellectual German family and my stepfather worked in factories in the East End. It was complicated.” Talbot and her elder brother, three and five when their parents divorced, found their escape in drawing and acting. “The world was much more parent-centric then. Children had to carve out their own space.”
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/2d00e8905510d77b7442745366a6df8999d6d4a3/175_0_1707_1366/1000.jpg\")
\n She did an arts course in Canterbury, then studied fine art at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design and did an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. In the mid-1990s, while teaching art at Northumbria University, she met the sculptor Paul Mason, who she married. Their two sons, Zachary and Daniel, were seven and six when he died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2006. It was an unthinkable turn – but for Talbot, it brought a new direction.
\n“Paul was the person I shared my stories with,” she says. “Then he wasn’t there any more. And that’s what life’s about, isn’t it? Sharing our stories. Suddenly there was this big void and I started to fill it with drawings – to get out the things I would have said to him.”
\nBut still, she had overwhelming doubts. “I’d pay the babysitter and go to the studio and think, ‘I can’t do this any more. Maybe I’m not an artist after all.’ But slowly, I realised I had this incredible freedom again – just as I did when I was a kid.” Her art – previously paintings created using found photographs – changed. “I started to paint on silk. I like the contrast between the lightness of the silk and the weight of the stories. I like that silk is so light, so fluid.”
\n![\"‘I](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/b7006c2cd53d15e6057d3160297734a90c0cc479/224_194_1040_634/1000.jpg\")
\n Another work at Compton Verney is The Human Experience, two 11-metre long swathes of silk, wrapped around the gallery, taking the visitor on a journey through life, from conception to death. “It’s about how you move through a world that’s dangerous and uncertain. Because life experience comes from walking through volatility and uncertainty.”
\nIn the midst of her grief, and while coping with life as a single parent, she realised she had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by burrowing deeply into herself and making work that had little need of outside validation. “I realised I was finding a core version of myself. I could show myself honestly. I wasn’t concerned with what anyone would think. I thought, ‘This is about doing the work that matters.’ For me, art and life are indivisible.”
\nFollowing a residency in Italy, after she won the 2019 Max Mara prize, Talbot now divides her time between Reggio Emilia, in the country’s north, and the UK. Recognition on the continent has come easier than acknowledgment in Britain: she’s shown widely across Europe, with solo exhibitions ongoing in Copenhagen, Athens and Utrecht. Compton Verney ushers in a new chapter – but you get the sense it won’t change how she works. “Art is the glue between everything,” she says. “It’s there to help us make sense of the world. And making art is what I’ll carry on doing.”
\n• Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until 5 October
\n• This article was amended on 7 July 2025. An earlier version incorrectly said that Emma Talbot’s show at Compton Verney would be her first large-scale exhibition.
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","webPublicationDate":"2025-07-07T07:01:01Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#951c55","navigationDownColour":"#e02b7f","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e02b7f","headlineColour":"#ffffff","quoteColour":"#fdadba","standfirstColour":"#ffffff","metaColour":"#ffffff","dividerColour":"#aa4977","backgroundColour":"#951c55","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#FFFFFF","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#e02b7f","kickerColour":"#fdadba","colourPalette":"feature1"},"lastModified":"2025-07-07T14:52:00Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/artanddesign/2025/jul/07/scared-heavy-questions-silk-emma-talbot","durationInSec":386},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3e4b138bf9bbe66260e8b729c0b4337439357577/0_0_7957_5306/master/7957.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=3baef29e3ec9993c3fac11bd54282d9d","height":5306,"width":7957,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"‘Personal’ … The Tragedies by Emma Talbot. 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She talks us through her dark obsessions – and the tragedy that changed everything","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1e1632b3758fe42fec9d691017210f186e83e8d8/867_0_6880_5504/master/6880.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=a61f792ef04f342598392e74d0cf2c66","height":5504,"width":6880,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Courtesy the artist and Kunsthall Stravanger","altText":"From conception right through to death … The Human Experience by Talbot.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Kunsthall Stravanger"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/07/scared-heavy-questions-silk-emma-talbot?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/07/scared-heavy-questions-silk-emma-talbot?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/07/scared-heavy-questions-silk-emma-talbot?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"‘It’s almost like Vaseline’: artists including Antony Gormley swap paint for seaweed ink in art challenge","rawTitle":"‘It’s almost like Vaseline’: artists including Antony Gormley swap paint for seaweed ink in art challenge","item":{"trailText":"Ocean-inspired artworks created using kelp-based pigment will be sold to raise funds for conservation","body":"Last year in early summer, Alex Glasgow could be seen hauling up a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm, located off the west coast of Scotland near Skye. Growing on the farm was what Glasgow described as “perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet”: seaweed.
\nThe weed from Glasgow’s farm, KelpCrofters, is used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making and is part of a burgeoning industry – not just in Scotland, but around the world.
\nSome of the seaweed from that haul last summer, however, had a very particular purpose. It was made into ink to be used by 16 artists in a forthcoming exhibition that will raise money for WWF’s ocean conservation projects. The Guardian spoke to five of them to find out how they got on.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/57b50882c04e62abf9bfe5b986c419e59e51e8bc/0_0_4437_3136/1000.jpg\")
\n When I am in the embrace of seawater, I feel most alive and most at home. I spent the summers of my youth by and in the sea, and I regard all the elements as my closest relations.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/e69212f09091298fdeb242e8d4fb90574fac03af/432_0_1600_2000/800.jpg\")
\n We have treated the sea in a similar way to the outreaches of our atmosphere – both are out of immediate sight, and we use them to hide our waste. The band of space trash that circles our planet is the aerial equivalent of the microplastics, heavy metals, hydrocarbons and all of the human waste that has ended up in our oceans. They are the generative engine of the blue planet, out of which all life has come. It is the oceans that have allowed the biosphere to survive through five extinctions and this will undoubtedly be true for the sixth.
\nI found the seaweed ink very thick: it reminded me of the plough mud in West Wittering, and brought back the smell and atmosphere of my childhood. It was not so easy to use, and it took a few goes before getting a result that I felt happy with.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/3e9fca72e55d8c287ae64aadc55af756959754a5/0_0_8256_5504/1000.jpg\")
\n When I opened the first pot of seaweed ink the smell hit me instantly: I was back to my childhood, scrabbling around on the beach in the west of Scotland. But when I go back to that beach today I notice differences: there are no sea anemones, less seaweed, fewer birds.
\nI’m always interested in what’s happening beyond where we can see; what’s happening below the surface? There’s a whole world under the sea, and we know so little about it. When I was a child in Toward there was a US base on the Holy Loch, so I was used to seeing submarines emerge from under the waves. There will be a submarine in my artwork.
\nThere’s a slippery greasiness to the ink; I didn’t want to mix it with anything else, because I wanted it to give the full impact of coming from the sea.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/1a2559f76c9c0126839cb670daf4a39e8c6f3c94/0_0_8256_5504/1000.jpg\")
\n The seaweed ink is like watercolour, and I’m using it on silk: I love the idea of using natural products. I went to Scotland to visit the seaweed farm, and was fascinated to see the process that produced the ink. Also I love the colour it produces – it’s sepia, a kind of in-between colour, browny-green. I also like how this new product feels futuristic, but also links to something really ancient, and connects so deeply with the planet.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/eb4d99edf036aa2726b06fe91b2f671f592149e2/0_0_4409_5879/750.jpg\")
\n There’s something important about being by the sea. It’s expansive, a reminder of the vastness of nature and the tininess of humans. Also, the built environment feels far away: nature sometimes doesn’t feel real, but when you look out to sea or go in a boat, you realise how real it is.
\nMy artwork features a selkie, a creature who can shift between being a seal and being a human – and I feel that’s a metaphor, because we need a different relationship with nature, one that’s more in balance with it.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/c2f553d6bc2b11c719b9b9be1523d321233dfee1/0_0_7841_5228/1000.jpg\")
\n I live by the sea in Sussex; we have a tiny boat, and sometimes when we’re out in it a seal comes close and it sometimes feels a bit uneasy, a bit precarious. And in my painting there’s a little figure with a snorkel on who’s underwater, and there’s a slight air of threat.
\nI’ve also made a sculpture of a seal – it’s beautiful and fun and ludicrous. I want people who see it to think how it shouldn’t be reclining on a chaise longue, it should be in the sea. I’d like you to enjoy it but also feel a sense of anxiety: because there’s so much going on with the sea that isn’t healthy, and we need to worry about that.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/d7ee690fd2be8b2bd6bcc3b7ba98c27ff69ec4a8/2817_732_4698_3132/1000.jpg\")
\n It’s been exciting to work with seaweed ink. I use a lot of traditional pigments, grinding them in the way pigments were made in the past, and for this project I’ve included ground-down stones and mussel and oyster shells I’ve found on the beach.
\nThe seaweed ink is very viscous, almost like Vaseline. I’ve used it to create an abstract seascape on paper, using marbling. And there’s a big element of chance, as there always is in my work, about what’s going to emerge.
\nArt for Your Oceans will be on show at Sotheby’s in London from 7 to 15 May. The art will be sold to raise funds for WWF ocean conservation initiatives in the UK and beyond
\nOcean-inspired artworks created using kelp-based pigment will be sold to raise funds for conservation
\n\n","webPublicationDate":"2025-04-23T04:00:08Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#951c55","navigationDownColour":"#e02b7f","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e02b7f","headlineColour":"#ffffff","quoteColour":"#fdadba","standfirstColour":"#ffffff","metaColour":"#ffffff","dividerColour":"#aa4977","backgroundColour":"#951c55","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#FFFFFF","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#e02b7f","kickerColour":"#fdadba","colourPalette":"feature1"},"lastModified":"2025-04-23T04:01:02Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/environment/2025/apr/23/its-almost-like-vaseline-artists-including-antony-gormley-swap-paint-for-seaweed-ink-in-art-challenge","durationInSec":291},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/57b50882c04e62abf9bfe5b986c419e59e51e8bc/0_0_4437_3136/master/4437.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=2506549ed210e9eefd0f85ef9a968bba","height":3136,"width":4437,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"within(fortheoceans) by Antony Gormley. 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Now a new exhibition at Ditchling, where he lived, is giving survivors a say","body":"A young girl kneels on her bedroom floor, hands pressed together, as another figure towers over her, one arm raised. This watercolour, made by Eric Gill, is titled Annunciation – but for the abuse survivors currently working on a show of his work that will open in the town where he lived, this scene is far from holy. For them, it is loaded with disturbing overtones.
\n“What I see isn’t the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel. It’s a scared little girl in a room where she ought to feel safe, with a terrifying figure looming over her, blocking the exit,” says Vivien Almond, one of the survivors involved in the project. “There’s no way out – even the window behind her is tiny.” The image, says Almond, is “all about power – the power that figure has over that young girl invading her space, threatening her. And that’s what Eric Gill was all about.”
\n\nAlmond knows what she’s talking about: as a child, she was sexually abused by her own father over many years, just as Gill’s two elder daughters Betty and Petra were – a fact that didn’t come to light until a biography by Fiona MacCarthy was published in 1989, the author having found evidence of the crimes in Gill’s own previously unseen diaries.
\nSince then the world has grappled with how to treat the artist’s work. Some galleries have quietly removed it from view. Last week, one of his most famous pieces, a sculpture of Prospero and Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was returned to public view at BBC Broadcasting House in London, albeit behind a protective screen, following an incident in which it was damaged. A QR code nearby now links to details of Gill’s crimes.
\n![\"Back](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/cd01a532b917bfa93ffd47174f0bacbf3c85c19f/0_104_3700_2221/1000.jpg\")
\n The BBC said it had taken “expert advice”, although it isn’t clear if that was from survivors. This new show is believed to be the first time survivors of abuse have been directly involved in deciding whether and what to show of Gill’s work and how to interpret it. It is being put together at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, the institution most strongly associated with his story. The museum is in the Sussex village that was home for six years to Gill and the artistic community he founded, which continued to be based there after he and his family moved to Wales in the 1920s.
\nSince Gill’s crimes became known, the museum, says its director Steph Fuller, has never sought to hide from the reprehensible elements of his story. A statement on its website condemns his abuse, but adds that his “importance to art and design history in the UK and across the world is impossible to ignore”.
\n\nYet Fuller thinks more needs to be said. “I’ve felt for a while,” she says, “that the voices missing in our interpretation are the voices of the daughters who were subjected to the abuse.” Those daughters are now dead, but one day two years ago, Fuller found herself talking to Ann Sumner, chair of the Methodist Modern Art Collection (MMAC) in London. Sumner was wondering what to do with a Gill painting owned by the MMAC. From that conversation grew the idea of a new exhibition, which will lead in time to a re-imagining of the Ditchling collection overall, curated with four abuse survivors, members of the Methodist Survivors Advisory Group.
\nOne thing the survivors were clear about, says Fuller, was the importance of showing Gill’s work and not sweeping it under the carpet. “They said hiding things and not talking about them is the culture in which abuse flourishes. There are lots of very difficult and emotive issues to discuss here. But if the survivors can do it, then the rest of us certainly can.”
\nAlmond adds: “If you don’t show his work, you’re not telling the story of this man. My view is it needs to be seen, but included alongside it needs to be the story of what this man did, how he abused his daughters. It’s been said what he did didn’t affect these women much. But that’s rubbish. If you suffer abuse, it stays with you, it’s a pain you never get rid of, and it changes everything else that happens to you.”
\n![\"‘He](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/f341c375b5edfb5d924466a7edd3d7ba435b7e47/108_154_5960_3577/1000.jpg\")
\n The new display will be part of an exhibition at Ditchling entitled It Takes a Village, to open in early July. It will include both Annunciation, the work that so struck Almond, and other pieces including Gill drawings of Betty and Petra, among them a nude of Betty when she was 16. “That was drawn at the point when the abuse was happening,” says Fuller.
\nFiona, another survivor involved in the Ditchling project, says she’s been surprised by how little museums and art galleries have consulted survivors when making decisions around Gill’s work. “Art has a tendency to be self-congratulatory and pretentious. Art historians think they know things, but actually all they know about is art. They don’t know what it’s like to survive abuse.”
\nOne issue for her is monetary value. “When someone is a name, their work is worth more. It’s to do with someone’s reputation, but it shouldn’t be only their artistic reputation – because with Gill you’ve got someone who was much revered, but we now know he was a very unpleasant character: sleazy, a paedophile. So his value should reflect that reputation as well.”
\n![\"Also](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/bc8a632c68fb53bd81f69f87e46bc55b93dc9b82/730_267_3068_3068/1000.jpg\")
\n Fiona testified against her abuser, a man who lodged in her family home when she was a child, decades after his crimes took place, and he was convicted and imprisoned. “I wanted to hold him to account, and I want to hold Gill to account. He was a smug and arrogant man and in writing about his abuse in his diaries, I think perhaps he wanted it all to come out eventually – he wanted the world to see how clever he’d been, hiding it all from everyone, making people think he was so saintly.”
\nNow in her 70s, Fiona says the attitude to abuse has changed for survivors over the years. “It used to be hushed up, and people would say it doesn’t do any real harm. But now it’s being more talked about that view has changed – so getting more people to speak about it is the way forward.”
\nChildhood books made by the Gill daughters and the 1922 sculpture Divine Lovers (Icon) – showing Christ embracing a figure representing the church – will also be included in the display, which will be in a separate room at the museum. “We’re very mindful of visitors who might have been victims of abuse,” says Fuller. “There will be a notice explaining the content before people go into the room.”
\nSurvivors’ sensitivities have tended to be more around works that home in on intimate situations in the home, rather than with pieces that are sexually explicit, says Fuller. “We’ve been talking a lot about abuse holistically, how it happens and the family dynamics around it. Also, because the survivors are from a Christian group, and Gill was a Catholic, they’ve been interested in how he depicted spiritual and divine subjects in a sexualised way.”
\n• It Takes a Village is at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, East Sussex, in July.
\n• In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
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Now a new exhibition at Ditchling, where he lived, is giving survivors a say","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c5d8fe44f67f4cb1baf9671ad17e082e059ded76/217_105_1585_951/master/1585.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=510675d08777f074a8ecbb278db92734","height":951,"width":1585,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft collection","altText":"‘I see a scared little girl’ … Annunciation by Gill.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft collection"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/18/eric-gill-abuse-survivors-ditchling-exhibition?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/18/eric-gill-abuse-survivors-ditchling-exhibition?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/18/eric-gill-abuse-survivors-ditchling-exhibition?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"‘Freak pictures’: Ireland’s art revolutionaries who were treated so badly one fled to a nunnery","rawTitle":"‘Freak pictures’: Ireland’s art revolutionaries who were treated so badly one fled to a nunnery","item":{"trailText":"They were artistic trailblazers, bringing modernism to the then deeply conservative country. But Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett faced huge hostility. Now a thrilling new show is celebrating their brilliance – and determination","body":"Two oils on canvas hang together, strikingly similar, in the first room of the National Gallery of Ireland’s new show. Both titled Composition, they date from 1924 and 1925. They’re cubist still lifes, with the regular, geometric patterns and contrasting colour schemes favoured by many early 20th-century modernists, Marcel Duchamp and Juan Gris among them.
\nThe paintings are clearly by the same hand. Except they’re not. The 1924 work, featuring what might be a fried egg, or might be an easel, is by Evie Hone; the piece from the following year, centred on a chessboard, is by her best friend, Mainie Jellett. These two women, virtually unknown outside their homeland, and not well-known even there, revolutionised art in Ireland by introducing modernism.
\nIn the deeply conservative country that it was at the time, that didn’t always meet a favourable response. And yet they soldiered on, buoyed up by one another across several decades, plying their craft, and turning their hands to different styles and art-forms.
\nSo the exhibition feels very eclectic. Here there’s cubism; there, abstraction; in the next room, we’re back to figuration. In another room landscapes, and elsewhere devotional religious art. Most are paintings, but one room is filled with the stained glass that Hone spent part of her career focusing on – she made commissions for public buildings and churches alike.
\n![\"Mainie](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/a8e995e96a4a5efa52bcad3ba16853242ae319c8/40_31_1607_2574/624.jpg\")
\n But there is one element that unites almost all the 90 artworks in the exhibition, and it’s colour. Bright colours, primary colours; rich colours, strong colours; clashing colours, harmonious colours: they sing out of every room, and without knowing anything else about the women who put them together, they tell you that this pair believed in life and believed in art.
\nThey were both born in Dublin, into well-to-do middle class families. While they met for the first time in London during the first world war, this exhibition traces their story from the early 1920s, when they moved to Paris to train under André Lhote, and then Albert Gleizes, whose work exploring abstraction they very much admired. He didn’t take students, but the pair had made up their minds: he remained in touch with them all their lives, and much is made in the show of the importance of his influence on their work. It was a two-way street – Gleizes acknowledged the importance of Hone and Jellett on his own oeuvre – but art history in its inimitable way has remembered him, and airbrushed them out.
\nFor now, though, they’re back. The quality of the art is as eclectic as the styles. The standout piece is Jellett’s Decoration (1923): fantastically well composed, immensely pleasing, this piece pays homage to the work of the Renaissance artists whose work both women adored (they knew it mostly through reproductions), painted in tempera on wood with gold leaf to reference that period of art history. But it’s more than a homage: it’s a marrying together of old and new, a gorgeous abstract depiction of the ages-old Madonna and Child, contained within the shape of a Trecento altarpiece, with a pointillist background.
\nSheer genius, and considered today to be the single most significant modernist painting in Irish history, it went down like a ton of bricks: writer George “AE” Russell made the astonishing remark that there was nothing much to say about it. The following year, 1924, Jellett and Hone had a joint show – the current show in Dublin is only the second time their work has been shown together – which was met, again, with much criticism.
\nThe Irish Times used the phrase “freak pictures” in a review, and Russell again had a field day, referring to their work as “artistic malaria”. It all weighed heavily on them both, so much so that it was almost certainly a factor in Hone’s decision to enter an Anglican convent in Cornwall in 1925, much to the horror of Jellett, who was left alone trying to convince the Irish art world of the importance of modernism.
\n![\"Magnificent](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/fd2eb0567c555fe9e57e4bf6ffd14f98001795b8/0_21_1755_2409/729.jpg\")
\n Happily Hone’s life as a nun was short-lived, and just over a year later Jellett went to retrieve her and return her to her primary vocation as an artist. But religion remained a central theme, for Hone – who later in her life became a Catholic – and also for Jellett, whose other works shown here include a striking Deposition (1939) and an intense crucifixion titled The Ninth Hour (1941).
\nHone, though, would mostly pour her religious feelings into her stained glass, using her cubist training and love of strong colour to great effect in a series of windows including one often-seen on Irish TV, My Four Green Fields, as it’s installed in the Department of the Taoiseach (having been made originally for the 1939 New York World’s Fair) providing a backdrop to many a government statement. The window, bringing the symbols of Ireland’s four provinces – Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht – together, was one of her greatest triumphs.
\nBut an even more magnificent example of her stained glass is in England, and sadly behind closed doors (excepting occasional public tours of the college). It’s a huge (almost 1,300 sq ft) window in Eton College chapel, and it was commissioned to replace a window destroyed by bombing during the second world war. The window, showing the Last Supper in the lower section and the crucifixion above, is regarded as one of Britain’s finest 20th-century examples of stained glass. In Dublin we get only a glimpse of its splendour via a watercolour study Hone made in 1950.
\n![\"Evie](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/136b5dc52e775fbd4df78ac1c26dcad435e1a8fb/0_0_2029_1508/1000.jpg\")
\n By then, Jellett had died, aged 46, of cancer. Hone visited her in the nursing home on her last night. Neither woman had ever married; and while there is no suggestion they were a couple, they clearly filled a role that might be called a partnership in each other’s lives. Jellett had spent her final years much influenced by Chinese art, after a visit to an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Hone, despite the legacy of childhood polio which affected her throughout her life, continued to travel in France and Italy – as works here attest – and painted the woods and landscape around her home in Marlay in the Dublin hills.
\nBy the end of their careers, the women – whose work had been so similar in the early days – had each found her own style, with Hone’s intuitive, freer approach contrasting with Jellett’s much more precise attention to detail. Convergence, divergence and a friendship that brought the stirrings of the great changes in Ireland that continue to play out to this day.
\n• Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, from 10 April to 10 August
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/x22xvz","section":"Art and design","id":"artanddesign/2025/apr/10/freak-pictures-irelands-art-revolutionaries-who-were-treated-so-badly-one-fled-to-a-nunnery","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ef3e7988acab07e3c0e32a1f2bbee7256f871c10/0_0_2700_1783/master/2700.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=b33172767e7e74527615cea24d1be071","height":1783,"width":2700,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Mainie Jellett’s Achill Horses, 1941. Photograph: Photograph: Photo © National Gallery of Ireland","credit":"Photo © National Gallery of Ireland","altText":"Mainie Jellett’s Achill Horses, 1941.","cleanCaption":"Mainie Jellett’s Achill Horses, 1941.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Photo © National Gallery of Ireland"}],"shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"They were artistic trailblazers, bringing modernism to the then deeply conservative country. But Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett faced huge hostility. Now a thrilling new show is celebrating their brilliance – and determination
","webPublicationDate":"2025-04-10T11:20:13Z","style":{"navigationColour":"#951c55","navigationDownColour":"#e02b7f","navigationButtonColour":"#ffffff","ruleColour":"#e02b7f","headlineColour":"#ffffff","quoteColour":"#fdadba","standfirstColour":"#ffffff","metaColour":"#ffffff","dividerColour":"#aa4977","backgroundColour":"#951c55","savedForLaterTrueColour":"#FFFFFF","savedForLaterFalseColour":"#e02b7f","kickerColour":"#fdadba","colourPalette":"feature1"},"lastModified":"2025-04-10T11:27:11Z","listenToArticle":{"uri":"https://mobile.guardianapis.com/uk/audio/artanddesign/2025/apr/10/freak-pictures-irelands-art-revolutionaries-who-were-treated-so-badly-one-fled-to-a-nunnery","durationInSec":404},"bodyImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a8e995e96a4a5efa52bcad3ba16853242ae319c8/40_31_1607_2574/master/1607.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=b0fba576373ec6096f34d2d155dd3da4","height":2574,"width":1607,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"The single most significant modernist painting in Irish history … Mainie Jellett’s Decoration, 1923. 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Photograph: Photograph: Photo © National Gallery of Ireland","credit":"Photo © National Gallery of Ireland","altText":"Mainie Jellett’s Achill Horses, 1941.","cleanCaption":"Mainie Jellett’s Achill Horses, 1941.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Photo © National Gallery of Ireland"},"campaigns":[],"designType":"Feature","palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#A1845C","main":"#A1845C","secondary":"#EACCA0","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#A1845C","shadow":"#DCDCDC","immersiveKicker":"#EACCA0","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#A1845C","kickerText":"#A1845C","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#A1845C","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#866D50","featureKickerText":"#E7D4B9","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#6B5840"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#E7D4B9"},"atoms":[]},"trailText":"They were artistic trailblazers, bringing modernism to the then deeply conservative country. But Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett faced huge hostility. Now a thrilling new show is celebrating their brilliance – and determination","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ef3e7988acab07e3c0e32a1f2bbee7256f871c10/0_76_2700_1621/master/2700.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=12197b01751b0b05370ba00713afe3b3","height":1621,"width":2700,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Photo © National Gallery of Ireland","altText":"Mainie Jellett’s Achill Horses, 1941.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Photo © National Gallery of Ireland"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/10/freak-pictures-irelands-art-revolutionaries-who-were-treated-so-badly-one-fled-to-a-nunnery?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/10/freak-pictures-irelands-art-revolutionaries-who-were-treated-so-badly-one-fled-to-a-nunnery?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/10/freak-pictures-irelands-art-revolutionaries-who-were-treated-so-badly-one-fled-to-a-nunnery?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Keep your head above water: art show looks at the rising seas","rawTitle":"Keep your head above water: art show looks at the rising seas","item":{"trailText":"From a high chair to the ocean floor, Can the Seas Survive Us? in Norfolk’s Sainsbury Centre explores our watery world and the climate crisis","body":"One of the most striking things that will be on display at an exhibition in Norfolk this weekend is an oak chair. Ordinary enough, except that it is elevated high in the air. Why? Because this is where it will need to be in 2100, given rising sea levels in the Netherlands, where it was made by the artist Boris Maas.
\nEntitled The Urge to Sit Dry (2018), there is another like it in the office of the Dutch environment minister in The Hague, a constant reminder of the real and immediate threat posed to the country by rising sea levels.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ed9350e7a2bfa906de80ec5e12c410edb6ccbf12/0_902_3611_4513/800.jpg\")
\n The Dutch artist Boris Maas with his 2018 work The Urge to Sit Dry, which uses wooden blocks to lift the chair to the height it needs to be to sit above predicted sea levels
\nThe chair is part of Can the Seas Survive Us?, which opens this weekend in the Sainsbury Centre, a Norwich art gallery and museum. The location is significant: Norfolk is one of the areas of the UK most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Visitors will take a metaphorical dive into the murky complexities of an ecosystem we all know is at risk, but often find hard to decipher, still less to work out what we can do to change things.
\n“As with so many of the big, thorny questions around climate and the future of the planet, people don’t know where to start,” says Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre.
\n“ We can project people’s imaginations and realities to places and spaces they would never otherwise have access to – they can be transported to melting Arctic ice floes, to the Pacific hundreds of years ago, to underneath the sea today.”
\nThe exhibition consists of three separate shows. The first is A World of Water, held in a series of underground galleries painted, Rothko-like, in a shade of baby blue on top (to symbolise the sea we swim in) and a deep, marine green below (symbolising the vast, hidden sea).
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/865d9ab0751151347442db5a29bd4ea7b3a5de1d/0_0_3024_3024/1000.jpg\")
\n Evan Ifekoya’s video Contoured Thoughts (2019). The sea is an ‘embodied presence’ in the artist’s work. Courtesy of Lux, London
\nOne of objects is a tall, grey-green sculpture, with a Barbara Hepworth-like aperture at its centre. But this is nothing to do with Hepworth: it’s by a Rotterdam artist, Jan Eric Visser, a sculptor whose raw material is rubbish – in this case, plastics collected from waterways.
\nMany of the artists in this show – put together by John Kenneth Paranada, the Sainsbury Centre’s curator of art and climate change – are Dutch, underlining the impact the climate crisis has had and will continue to have on the work of those artists who feel the threat most keenly.
\nIn one wonderful textile piece, Radical Furniture for Radical Times (2019) by Koen Taselaar, octopuses – a species known for their intelligence and adaptability – seem to have taken over and now live in an underwater house with brightly painted staircases, dressing tables and lamps, and a sofa on which a couple of them are comfortably sprawling.
\n![\"An](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/8c7b5a8f190586afa4b7e7791c12e3e9f1c4206f/0_0_5700_5000/1000.jpg\")
\n Maggi Hambling’s Wall of Water VIII (2011). ‘Water is a metaphor for life,’ she says. ‘The sea can represent your happiest moments and your darkest moments’
\nAnd British artists are also responding to the climate emergency: both Maggi Hambling and Claire Cansick, whose work is in the show, have been clear about their concern over climate change and its impact on their painting.
\nHambling’s Wall of Water VIII (2011) is one of the show’s standout pieces – a tide of greys, blues, pinks and blacks that is at once mesmerisingly beautiful and ominous. Cansick’s canvases, painted from snapshots taken while she was swimming, merge the world of sea, land and air – she depicts waves but they might be grass or clouds.
\n![\"Two](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ac6dd3b758e3495ca04e90f38fe9a5e7bfb0d166/0_378_6803_8505/800.jpg\")
\n ![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/643004383ce475a92644f6ca24685a80e8d7290d/1325_0_2255_2820/800.jpg\")
\n Yuki Kihara, Two Fa’afafine (after Gauguin), and Darwin Drag. Courtesy of Milford Galleries. The artist recasts Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings using Fa’afafine, a third gender community in Sāmoa. In Darwin Drag, a new video work, Kihara is transformed into Charles Darwin to explore how the biologist hid his findings on queer species
\nThe show explores the mysterious territory known as Doggerland, which 7,000 years ago connected what are now Norfolk and the Netherlands. It would have been possible to walk from one to the other, encountering mammoths, bears and woolly rhinoceroses along the way.
\nThe Strangers Case (In The Age Of Meltdown), a film made last year by Nabuurs&VanDoorn, imagines this prehistoric land lost to the rising sea, prompting the realisation that this is the same fate now facing Pacific nations such as the Cook Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati.
\n![\"An](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/c9fc56b00a5b8d5d10f03ccfc49a29f942ce21d1/0_0_5430_3600/1000.jpg\")
\n Devonian Period (1992), a photographic work from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Dioramas series, depicting the emergence of aquatic life 400m years ago and charting the emergence and extinction of humankind. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery
\nAs part of the preparation for Can The Seas Survive Us?, Parananda took a group of artists, curators and academics on a 36-hour voyage across the North Sea from Yarmouth to Rotterdam onboard a 24-metre (77ft) fishing smack built in Lowestoft in 1921.
\n\nThe other two components of the show alongside A World of Water are Darwin in Paradise Camp, in which Yuki Kihara explores Charles Darwin’s manipulation of his findings on non-heteronormative species and same-sex attraction in animals to suggest they were rare and unnatural; and Sea Inside, which explores what it feels like to live underwater.
\n“What we want to do overall is bring the oceans closer to home,” says Parananda. “Because water and the sea connect all of us, wherever and whoever we are.”
\nCan The Seas Survive Us? is made up of three overlapping exhibitions: A World of Water and Darwin in Paradise Camp, which run 15 March – 3 August and Sea Inside, 7 June – 26 October
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/xxmjvp","section":"Environment","id":"environment/2025/mar/13/can-the-seas-survive-us-sainsburys-centre-norwich-art-exhibition-rising-seas-climate","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/516768f6fd89dacd581102cb8ba52f592cc020c5/244_668_4220_2533/master/4220.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=e4d2502e9b856b1eb69161377d75b4ef","height":2533,"width":4220,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Ólafur Elíasson’s Shore compass (2018), which uses material gathered on beaches in Iceland. A magnet transforms it into a compass. Photograph: Photograph: Ólafur Elíasson/Courtesy of i8 Gallery","credit":"Ólafur Elíasson/Courtesy of i8 Gallery","altText":"A blue polystyrene foam ring encircles a long piece of driftwood below which a magnet is suspended","cleanCaption":"Ólafur Elíasson’s Shore compass (2018), which uses material gathered on beaches in Iceland. A magnet transforms it into a compass.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Ólafur Elíasson/Courtesy of i8 Gallery"}],"standFirst":"From a high chair to the ocean floor, Can the Seas Survive Us? in Norfolk’s Sainsbury Centre explores our watery world and the climate crisis
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Underneath them are as many as 100,000 oysters, waiting to be sold to the upmarket hotels down the coast.
\nCheli Mendez, who oversees the project, pulls a shell up from below, cuts it open with a knife, and gives me the contents to try: a plump, tasty oyster. Mendez is one of a group known as Guardianas del Conchalito, or guardians of the shells, and theirs is the first oyster-growing business in the region run entirely by women, she says.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/eb62c88c5d1af01df40791b9591819440d44acb0/0_0_9504_6336/1000.jpg\")
\n The women dug a channel with shovels and pickaxes to allow seawater to reach the mangroves
\nBut this is far from the only success this unusual group of women has had. It all began with four of them sitting round a rickety picnic table, staring out across a rubbish-strewn mangrove plantation in the spring of 2017. They were angry: their fishing village was being ruined by drug-dealers and fast-encroaching tourism, and the shellfish they treasured were being depleted by illegal fishing.
\n\nNone of the women had been educated beyond school, but they did understand that they risked losing everything unless something was done to change things
\n“The mangroves were dying, the trash was everywhere,” says Graciela “Chela” Olachea, at 63 the oldest of the group. Huge lorries would arrive to fly-tip on a regular basis, and joyriders on motorbikes would screech across the land. Claudia Reyes, 41, says: “Things were bad, and getting worse.”
\nSoon others had joined them at the picnic table in El Manglito, the neighbourhood of La Paz made famous by John Steinbeck. He wrote about the area’s pearl divers – the forebears of these proud, strong women.
\n“The picnic table became our office,” says Reyes. They had come up with the name for their group by then, based on the callo de hacha, a rare type of scallop that are a prized local delicacy. “We went to the men who were the decision-makers in our community, and we said, ‘We want to clear the place up. And we want to be paid to do it.’”
\nThe men – their husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons – were not impressed. But they eventually and reluctantly agreed, offering wages for five women. But now there were 14 meeting around that picnic table. The money amounted to 8,500 Mexican pesos a week (£320) between them all, a tiny amount for each woman.
\n“But we agreed to it,” says Reyes. “We wanted to show we could do this: we wanted to make a difference, and we wanted to earn some money.”
\n![\"11](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/fa864796254a263f3a809b77c191732bfbf41aa8/0_0_8535_5690/1000.jpg\")
\n Las Guardianas del Conchalito. ‘I used to ask my husband’s permission if I wanted to leave the house. Now if I go out, I just tell him: “I’ll be back”,’ one says
\nThe women set about positioning boulders around the perimeter of the plantation to stop the lorries from coming in and to deter the motorbikes. They dug channels from the sea to restore the water flow to the mangroves and cleared the rubbish. They kept watch at the water’s edge, shouting at the illegal fishing boats, some of whose occupants were their own relatives, to go away.
\n\nAnd perhaps most impressively, they patrolled the land through the night, facing down, they say, the drug-dealers and telling them to move on.
\n***
\nToday we are talking near the old picnic table, sitting under a newly built palapa, or thatched sun shelter. Although February is winter and it’s early morning, the sun is already strong; temperatures will reach 28C (82.4F) in a few hours’ time.
\nThe Baja peninsula, snaking for 775 miles (1,250km) down the Mexican coast from the US border, is desert plains dotted with cacti. It is a growing tourist destination, and the guardianas suspect some of the rubbish in their mangroves was illegally dumped by construction companies.
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/c87eb3bc3133706b2d1be7fb3fb406834a65dd65/0_0_4977_3316/1000.jpg\")
\n ‘It’s not just what’s happening in the ocean … it all affects the shellfish,’ says Wildcoast’s Celeste Ortega, pictured. Above, the palapa where Las guardianas meet
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/4328b563039e52dde93da9df6711681fddbaf233/0_0_9504_6336/1000.jpg\")
\n The jewels of the region are the beaches: the nearby coves of Balandra are said to be the most beautiful in Mexico. And the seas here in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, is teeming: the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau called it “the world’s aquarium”. It is home to about 900 species of fish, including more than 70 found nowhere else on the planet, and its marine megafauna includes whale sharks, grey whales and humpback whales.
\nSlowly, the fishers of El Manglito came to understand the importance of sustainability, and the need to stick to quotas so the shellfish would thrive. The women’s first meeting around the picnic table had been in 2017; by autumn the following year, the area was unrecognisable. The drug-dealers had moved on; the fly-tipping had stopped. The mangroves are green and healthy now, and the whole plantation is pristine, with no litter in sight.
\nAt one point during our conversation, a motorbike appears with two young lads on the back. Several of the women get up and run across, shouting at them to go away. They do and quickly: the guardianas clearly are not women to be ignored.
\n![\"Two](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/8b2da34cb034ae7415b21f9796d312ae04c30f41/0_0_8214_5476/1000.jpg\")
\n A motorbike passes through the protected area. One task of Las Guardianas has been to ward off joyriders
\nAfter the mangrove was cleaned up, the women say that the men thought they could go back to how things had been – them doing the fishing, the women cleaning the shellfish for very little money, as they had in the past. “But we felt we had done the work,” says Daniela Bareño, 35. “We knew we deserved more. Chela would go down to the shore when they were out in their boats and yell: ‘These are ours.’ And the men would shout: ‘Get back to your kitchens.’”
\nBy now they were getting funding from environmental organisations. One of their backers was Wildcoast, a California-based charity dedicated to conserving coastal and marine ecosystems. Celeste Ortega, Wildcoast’s mangrove conservation manager, says: “We started talking to the women about the mangroves and how it’s not just what’s happening in the ocean, but what’s happening on the land that affects the shellfish.
\n\n“The trees are a vital part of the ecosystem and that’s the reason the shellfish are here: they attach themselves to the mangrove trees, and that’s how they grow.”
\nToday, the Guardianas del Conchalito is a legally recognised community co-operative and all its members receive a living wage.
\n“We do things differently from the men,” says Bareño. “They had a more individualistic attitude; we work democratically. We have meetings each Monday, we talk things through, we reach decisions collectively.”
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/73cdd74c1aa5c5c8a999a911203edf80083b27fa/0_874_6336_7920/800.jpg\")
\n ![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ca9cd7e4c88dbb51d9216583931c8c3289938540/0_647_6336_7920/800.jpg\")
\n ![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/09c0637cc89bc37201f8d844aa8f4db0bab0b780/8_1039_5012_6264/800.jpg\")
\n ![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ee5ca3f0a4eba6f656d3f54a55ad0f7450fa34e3/1854_0_5069_6336/800.jpg\")
\n The picnic table where Las Guardianas first got together; some of the community’s 100,000 or so oysters; Andrea, El Manglito’s first university graduate; the mangrove seedlings being planted to restore the plantation
\nAnd their work has paid off in other ways too. Andrea Mendez Garcia, 27, studied marine biology after school, becoming the first university graduate from El Manglito. Her inspiration is her mother, Marta – a guardiana.
\nOther women say their work has influenced their children as well. “My girls are proud of me,” says Adriana Mendez, 56, of her two daughters. “One is at university doing bioengineering and agriculture.”
\n\nAway from the sea, the biggest changes for the Guardianas del Conchalito have been in their own lives. “Before all this, I didn’t really believe in myself,” says Reyes. “But now I know I can achieve things: I know it’s possible.”
\nOther women say their relationships have been upended, too. “I used to ask my husband’s permission if I wanted to leave the house,” says Rosa María Hale Romero, who’s in her early 60s. “Now if I go out, I just tell him: ‘I’ll be back.’ And instead of me serving him, he brings me my coffee.”
\nAll the women laugh, in shared recognition; and then they are silent for a moment. After a while, Reyes speaks again. “The truth is, it wasn’t only the mangrove we transformed,” she says. “We transformed ourselves as well.”
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/c0a8aebcb971c742b582768c318d72379d08cb22/0_0_9243_6162/1000.jpg\")
\n The cardon, or elephant cactus, at sunset in Baja California Sur\n
• This article was amended on 14 March 2025. La Paz is in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, not Baja California.
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The guardianas have about 100,000 growing off the coast Photograph: Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","credit":"Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","altText":"A person stands in knee-deep water holding a cage of oysters","cleanCaption":"Harvesting oysters. The guardianas have about 100,000 growing off the coast","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/09c0637cc89bc37201f8d844aa8f4db0bab0b780/8_1039_5012_6264/master/5012.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=f80e8954bde82a5f2f4a4c335e3556a2","height":6264,"width":5012,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"Andrea, one of the youngest members of the Guardianas and the first university graduate from El Manglito, with mangrove seedlings Photograph: Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","credit":"Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","altText":"A young woman smiles as she talks to someone off-camera as another woman tends to rows of small plants","cleanCaption":"Andrea, one of the youngest members of the Guardianas and the first university graduate from El Manglito, with mangrove seedlings","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ee5ca3f0a4eba6f656d3f54a55ad0f7450fa34e3/1854_0_5069_6336/master/5069.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=203a611bac5be9e9054956ee6399b1b1","height":6336,"width":5069,"orientation":"portrait","caption":"The guardianas are replanting mangroves Photograph: Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","credit":"Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","altText":"A person holds the tip of a seedling","cleanCaption":"The guardianas are replanting mangroves","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian"},{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c0a8aebcb971c742b582768c318d72379d08cb22/0_0_9243_6162/master/9243.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=45de17f2e13711c91e46ac5482bbdd2a","height":6162,"width":9243,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"The cardon, or elephant cactus, at sunset in Baja California Sur. Photograph: Photograph: Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","credit":"Benjamin Soto/The Guardian","altText":"A giant cactus silhouetted against a rosy pink sky","cleanCaption":"The cardon, or elephant cactus, \nIt was a routine antenatal appointment with many weeks still to go until the birth. “Things aren’t quite as we’d hope,” said the midwife, a worried look on her face. “You need to go straight to hospital.”
\nThe date was 8 April 1992. But also, it was 1 August 2024. The bump in 1992 was mine; the baby, who would be born the following day, at 29 weeks’ gestation (“term” is 40 weeks) was my daughter Rosie. The bump in 2024 was hers: 32 years on, history was repeating itself.
\nLike mine, Rosie’s pregnancy had been textbook up to that point. Like me, she’d had no warning that things could suddenly shift to red alert, with the baby in her uterus seemingly failing to thrive. And yet, of course, there was a warning – because patterns repeat in families. Sometimes, as perhaps in this case, it’s about genetics; other times it’s about something less tangible, a kind of inexplicable déjà vu. An illness that echoes something similar in a previous generation; a heartbreak that’s reminiscent of a heartbreak in another moment; a decision that seems to weirdly mirror a similar choice made decades before. And yet these “coincidences” take us unawares. Perhaps we can’t compute that the traumas of the previous generations will recur.
\nBut they do. Pre-eclampsia meant Rosie was plucked out of my womb much too soon: my husband, Gary, and I spent two months sitting anxiously by an incubator at St Thomas’ hospital in London. And yet, more than three decades on when I heard the wonderful news that Rosie was pregnant, it never entered my head that a similar experience might be in store for her and her partner, Toby. They live in Amsterdam; the baby was due on 22 September last year. As we live in the UK, I booked an apartment round the corner from theirs for six weeks from that date. “The baby will probably be late,” I said to Rosie. “Most babies are.”
\nJust as I had back in 1992, Rosie was planning a home birth – easier to organise in Holland, where they account for around one in three births (as compared with one in 50 in the UK). Just as Gary and I had been, she and Toby were hoping they’d be able to move to somewhere bigger than their flat after the baby arrived; just as we had, they were planning to meet other couples at antenatal classes expecting a baby around the same time as them. It was all back to the future for me: this would be our first grandchild and everything Rosie said about her life and her hopes, their plans and ambitions, echoed ours when we were expecting her. I reminisced happily about everything to do with having a baby but, somehow, I erased the trauma of my own first-born’s actual arrival. So, although Rosie talked to her caregivers about the circumstances of her own birth, we didn’t dwell on them; in fact, we hardly spoke about them at all.
\n\nEverything changed when, at 32 weeks, Rosie went for a routine scan. When she called me, I was driving down the A3 en route to a meeting. I answered the phone on the car speaker; within seconds I was tumbling back three decades. I knew instantly the shock, the fear, the total disbelief Rosie was feeling. I pulled off the road and into the first car park I saw. Rosie, so upset she couldn’t speak, had handed the phone to Toby; he began telling me a story I already knew. They were on their way to hospital, where more tests would be done. Although she had no signs of pre-eclampsia, the scan had shown the baby was tiny, much smaller than expected for the gestation.
\n“It’s going to be OK,” Rosie kept saying. She was, of course, her own role model. She had survived; her baby would survive. I believed that too, but also, I knew what lay ahead. Suddenly I remembered all too well the long weeks of hoping and waiting. Weeks when the entire backdrop to life was a series of beeping machines with alarms that would go off inexplicably, living a twilight existence in a part of the hospital most new parents never see, neonatal intensive care.
\nIt is physically exhausting and emotionally draining, because at the centre of it all is a new person, impossibly tiny, smaller than any baby you’ve ever seen or held before. In Rosie’s own case, she was so small and early that, at that time, there were no promises she would even survive. She was born around 12 hours after my routine antenatal appointment, by section, weighing 2lb 15oz. Ventilated for a fortnight, she failed to breathe on her own when she was first disconnected from the machine, and had to be back on it for another eight days. Even when we eventually brought her home, aged two months, at around the day when she should have been born, there were more difficulties in store: I was terrified of suddenly having sole responsibility for this minuscule infant. She only weighed 4lb at discharge.
\nOn the day Rosie told me she was at risk of giving birth prematurely, these memories all came flooding back. More than anything, I wanted to protect Rosie and Toby, and this as-yet-unborn child, from the experiences I knew lay ahead. But I knew I couldn’t. Even when life is on repeat, the scenes have to be played out; there’s no fast-forwarding over the difficult bits.
\nRosie stayed in hospital from the day she was admitted; the plan was to keep her baby inside until 34 weeks, when there would be the best chance of survival. Tests showed a continuing failure to thrive; as in my case with her, there was no option but to accelerate the birth by doing a caesarean. When the day came, she and Toby had at least been in hospital for a fortnight, and not just a few hours. There had been time to talk everything through, to plan for the first few hours and the first few days; to see the neonatal unit, to learn about the machines and the medics who would be caring for both them and their newborn.
\nTheir little boy, Sol, arrived at 11.30am on a sunny morning (hence his name). When Rosie was born, I didn’t get to see her for the first 48 hours – all I knew was that somewhere in the hospital was a baby who was pink, because that’s what the doctor had told me (hence her name). But I saw my grandson within an hour of his arrival: being invited to be at the Amsterdam hospital for the delivery was one of the greatest privileges of my life. For Rosie and Toby, miraculously – or so it seemed to me – there would be no separation from their baby, which I’d found one of the hardest parts of Rosie’s birth. He was cared for in an incubator alongside Rosie’s bed and Toby was able to stay in the room. They were a unit from day one. When I insisted on running out to buy champagne, I was celebrating not only that the baby was here and alive, but that my daughter and son-in-law and grandson seemed in a much better place than Gary and Rosie and I had been 32 years ago.
\nBorn at 34 weeks, Sol was bigger than Rosie – 3lb 5oz – and she had been able to take steroids before his birth, to help mature his lungs. For all of this, my heart was singing: it was déjà vu, but the re-run was a lot better than the original. Everything was going well and we were over the worst.
\n\nTwo mornings later I was woken at 7am by a call from Rosie. The baby’s condition had worsened significantly overnight; he had been blue-lighted across the city at 2am to the hospital for the sickest babies, with Rosie and Toby following in a second ambulance. The doctors at the new hospital weren’t sure what the problem was: all we could do was wait and hope.
\nWait and hope. I was back to where I’d been; and Rosie was back to where she’d been. Only this time she was the pale-looking mother who couldn’t take her eyes off the tiny baby in the incubator who was trying to stay alive.
\nThey were tense, long days – the sort of days it’s hard to see beyond. But slowly, Sol rallied, and then grew stronger. Today he’s six months old – a plump, chuckling, diamond of a boy – and you’d never know what he’d been through. But, like Rosie, who believes, as I do, that the circumstances of her arrival shaped the person she became, his earliest experiences will always be a part of him. And while Rosie already knew about her early birth and was her son’s role model for survival, his early months have also taught her – retrospectively – about her own beginnings.
\nPatterns so often repeat in families and even if they tend not to forewarn us for the future, they do teach us about the past. In the end, however painful it has been, we are all the richer for the experience. Most importantly, Rosie and Toby have their Sol, just as Gary and I have our Rosie. And that is one example of history repeating itself for which we will be forever grateful.
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/xxe4zj","section":"Life and style","id":"lifeandstyle/2025/feb/09/when-my-daughters-pregnancy-was-on-the-line-it-felt-like-history-was-repeating-itself","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ec3f0f291f1bf87d245839811a352fd362e8f217/697_1274_7818_4692/master/7818.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=ae9561b950e8ce3e225f328c441866cc","height":4692,"width":7818,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Survival patterns: Joanna Moorhead with her daughter Rosie and baby Sol. Photograph: Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer","credit":"Suki Dhanda/The Observer","altText":"Survival patterns: Joanna Moorhead with her daughter Rosie and baby Sol.","cleanCaption":"Survival patterns: Joanna Moorhead with her daughter Rosie and baby Sol.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer"}],"shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"Joanna Moorhead recalls her daughter’s difficult birth as she watches her go through the same thing 32 years later
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\nMy father doesn’t give much advice, which is a bit of a pisser considering he should know more about parenting than any man alive. He raised 11 children, and did most of that as a solo parent after my mum died tragically young. While she was alive, my parents supplemented their existing family responsibilities by fostering half a dozen children alongside their own, some for years at a time. He should, by rights, be a repository of information, the end-boss of disapproving dads needling me over every misstep and false start.
\nHe is not. He is stringently, almost frustratingly, loath to wade in with advice, even when prompted to do so. In six years of being a dad, I’ve only managed to record a tiny smattering of guidance he’s offered, scattered in my direction like gems from a reluctant king. First among those is his famous contention that “babies bounce”. He means this, more in consolation than recommendation, as a descriptor of infants’ incredible ability to persevere, and an inducement to worry less about all the horrible things that can, and will, happen to them.
\nAs for prohibitions, it was only under extreme duress that he eventually confessed that he distrusts “baby talk” and doesn’t see the point in speaking nonsense to children. Instantly, his penchant for delivering lectures to his grandchildren about the drainage of nearby fields, or the correct way to install a septic tank, made perfect sense. Other than that, any advice offered has been limited to assurances that everything will be alright, or perhaps a stern telling off when one of our children messes with the sacred contents of his fridge.
\nHe gives two main reasons for his reluctance to offer counsel. The first is all the unwanted advice he and my mother received from their own forebears, a generation who decried my parents’ “touchy-feely” attitude to family; namely, hugging and speaking to their children. This was rural Ireland in the early 1970s, a time when getting down on the floor and playing with your children was considered, if not actively illegal, then at least a very clear sign of mental illness.
\nThe second reason, however, is that he insists with a straight face that he doesn’t know what good his own advice would do. He claims the main thing he learned from parenting a, frankly, reckless number of children is that there are no one-size-fits-all fixes. Having achieved, you’d think, a sample size sufficient to deduce the secrets of child development, he instead found randomness everywhere he looked. Some of us walked at nine months, others two years. Some ate everything, others nothing at all. Some were borderline mutes ‘til the age of three, others chatting with the nurses as they slapped our bums and cut the cord. And all of us turned out, basically, fine. His contention, then as now, is that anyone telling you there’s only one way to soothe a child – or bid them to eat or sleep or read Shakespeare – is selling you something. And not just a book, but something more sinister still: the idea that you are always doing something wrong.
\nThere are days when I wish he was more demonstrative, but I realise what I really want is for him to step in and tell me the hidden secrets that will make the harder parts of parenting a little less daunting. But as much as I still desire a silver bullet that will end the sleepless nights and interminable meal times, the best advice he’s given me has been, annoyingly, its absence. If I had to distil his world view into one precept it would be the only real piece of advice I give parents to this day: you know more than you think.
\n![\"As](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/d4ebdbb931e3b3aebd42670ed9e29215966dd3fe/0_2_8083_4853/1000.jpg\")
\n ![\"](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/6048142b452395b4b8f8f57525a0dda36808efd0/190_175_1646_1645/1000.jpg\")
\nTime was, you were the one calling your mum and dad for advice. Should you buy a new house? What did they make of this issue with one of your kids? Or, I want to vent about this personal or work relationship?
\nBut at some point, usually between your 40s and your 60s, the power balance shifts. Gradually, it’s them needing support and advice. Should they sell up and move somewhere more manageable? How should they tell your sister they can’t handle looking after her kids any more? Or your mum calls to go on about how difficult your dad is, now he’s finally retired.
\nEvery family relationship is always in flux: but this shift is more momentous than most, because it feels like everything is up-ending. At its most extreme, you feel like the parent, and they’re the child. Even a subtle variation – those incidents where you see your parent looking to you to to make the decision, to make things OK – can be shocking.
\nAs with every relationship, the key is awareness: awareness of yourself and what this shift means to and for you, and awareness of your parent/s and what theirs means to and for them. Let’s start with the latter, as the change is driven by your parents’ ageing. From their point of view, they’re moving from the driving seat of the family car to the back seat. That comes with a sense of relief, but also fear: it’s a loss of control, and human beings are wired to want control, at least over their own lives.
\nFrom your point of view, you’ve reached proper adulthood: there’s no falling back on the myth that you’re still, at some level, a kid. That realisation also comes with both relief and fear.
\nThe power shift creates a space for a new way to relate – and into this vacuum can land all sorts of issues. You may feel your parents are being too demanding or too constant; you may feel annoyed, even angry, with them. The more you can empathise with their point of view, and the more aware you can be of hurts you may still be carrying about the way you were parented, the easier this recalibration will be: at least you’ll have a sense of where it’s rooted.
\nEvery situation is different, but there are some big points to keep in mind. First up is that, whatever is happening now, or will happen in the future in your ageing parent’s life, it will never be a reason for you to give up too much of your own life, and dreams, and ambitions. You only have your one life – the one your parents raised you to enjoy. Also, if you give up too much of yourself you’ll become resentful, and this will play out in all your relationships, including that with your parents. So create whatever boundaries you need to, ask for help, and voice your needs/fears (if not to a person, write them down in a journal).
\nKeep in mind that, though your parents’ lives are narrowing (and so will yours in time), you can help them keep as much width as possible. Encourage them to stick with their exercise class, or to try a new online course, or to have a coffee with that person they just met. Old age is partly about loss, and you can help them stave that off for as long as possible.
\nFinally, as with parenting your own children, the key to almost everything is to have fun together. Sure, that’s harder with ageing parents: but seek out the things you both enjoy. Watch old movies together; go for walks in the park; play the board games you enjoyed years ago. At its best, being with your parents as they age can give you the space to revisit happy times from your own past, as well as from theirs.
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Photograph: Photograph: kate_sept2004/Getty Images","credit":"kate_sept2004/Getty Images","altText":"Keeping relationships between the generations as smooth as possible","cleanCaption":"Happy families: keep relationships between the generations as smooth as possible.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: kate_sept2004/Getty Images"},"campaigns":[],"designType":"Feature","palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#BB3B80","main":"#BB3B80","secondary":"#FFABDB","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#951D7A","shadow":"#DCDCDC","immersiveKicker":"#FFABDB","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#BB3B80","kickerText":"#BB3B80","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#BB3B80","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#BB3B80","featureKickerText":"#FEC8D3","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#7D0068"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#FEC8D3"},"atoms":[]},"trailText":"Believe it or not, you know more about babies than you think – and try to have fun with your mum and dad. Advice from the experts for the ‘sandwich generation’","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0fa084b28f9ccee962c8b382e93ab77d4726a283/0_343_5168_3103/master/5168.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=35907a83f07054d1943b0b0151fb6441","height":3103,"width":5168,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"kate_sept2004/Getty Images","altText":"Keeping relationships between the generations as smooth as possible","cleanCredit":"Photograph: kate_sept2004/Getty Images"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/14/stuck-in-the-middle-advice-on-bringing-up-babies-and-caring-for-your-parents?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/14/stuck-in-the-middle-advice-on-bringing-up-babies-and-caring-for-your-parents?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/14/stuck-in-the-middle-advice-on-bringing-up-babies-and-caring-for-your-parents?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Live like a laird: 10 of the best Scottish castles to stay in","rawTitle":"Live like a laird: 10 of the best Scottish castles to stay in","item":{"trailText":"Grand halls, turret views and resident ghosts … From the Borders to the Highlands, these accommodating castles offer bags of history, luxury and escapism","body":"Home of the Duke and Duchess of Fife, who live on site, the 15th-century Kinnaird has three rented apartments, of which the Macduff Tower is the most traditional, with views out across its well-stocked deer park, and a huge bedroom with four-poster bed. If you’re looking for a castle stay with a dog in tow, this is for you – there’s no extra charge for canine guests and they’ll love running in the grounds. Kinnaird is only open to the public for one day each year (in September), so you’ll have the place to yourself; and if you enjoy wild swimming, head for the lake.\n
\n Macduff Tower, sleeps four, from £535 for two nights; kinnairdcastle.co.uk
![\"Grand](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/125fefa231dd6434e65a93b5143091096462952f/0_206_8693_5215/1000.jpg\")
\nSet on a hilltop above Dingwall, this isn’t your middle-of-nowhere castle – but what it lacks in location it more than makes up for within its walls, with an entrance hall that’s more cosy than baronial, but still with a sense of grandeur. Our room had a four-poster bed, and plenty of space for a sofa and armchairs. There’s a resident ghost, the green lady, as well as a panelled great hall, a dungeon and a friendly bar where we enjoyed smoked salmon and gin distilled about a mile away at GlenWyvis.\n
\n Rooms from £70 per night; bespokehotels.com/tullochcastlehotel
![\"Front](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/cc8d196f1ac6c17fec4a47b34581600b83fc36cd/0_53_4032_2419/1000.jpg\")
\nRun as a B&B, you’re staying in someone’s home… that just happens to be a castle. My bathroom alone was worth the trip: a vast, claw-foot, freestanding tub in the oldest part of the castle, a 12th-century tower. There are records of Thorntons owning the castle as far back as the 13th century: the current owners are descended from a lawyer who was distantly related to the original Thorntons, and bought it back in the 19th century. Find gorgeous views of the walled garden and surrounding countryside from the roof (ask for a tour) and for supper, try the sublime seafood at the Anchor in Johnshaven.\n
\n Rooms from £170 per night; thorntoncastle.com and also airbnb.co.uk
![\"Top](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/9e4e22403dca5b6a81ff1069bb2a77a433e8c0df/160_0_1827_1096/1000.jpg\")
\nThe most westerly castle in mainland Britain, on the remote Ardnamurchan Peninsula, is now a spectacular restaurant with rooms. The 13th-century castle sits right on the water’s edge, where Loch Sunart meets the sea – a wooden door on the courtyard opens on to a panoramic view across the water to the island of Mull. Restored in 2013, it’s run by chef Colin Nicholson and his business partner Jessica Thompson. Expect warm and cosy bedrooms (ours had a top-floor private balcony around the whole of the building, perfect for sunrise and sunset) and tasting menus of local flavours. Think lobster and langoustine from the local boats, venison from the estate, cheese from Mull, sausages from local pigs, and most of the produce are from the community garden down the road. You won’t want to leave, but if you’re blessed as we were with perfect blue skies and sun, head for the stunning Sanna Bay. \n
Rooms from £225 per night \n B&B; five-course dinner from £60 a head; mingarycastle.co.uk
![\"Topiary](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/415d5f68e60a8b58d30f8661eab77c291982a245/0_74_3000_1800/1000.jpg\")
\nThe fairytale Spedlins is a 15th-century, sandstone fortress with top-floor turrets, surrounded by boxy topiary. The owners bought it as a ruin in the 1980s and transformed it, without making it too grand. It manages to be homely but spectacular, with comfy sofas, huge fireplaces and lots of nooks and crannies. For wild swimmers there’s a lake and you can walk the Annandale Way, along paths Robert the Bruce once journeyed on horseback.\n
\n Sleeps 14, from £700 a night; spedlinscastle.co.uk
![\"Leslie](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ef43b183f937f9ef436028bc3cd509178865edea/0_175_4032_2419/1000.jpg\")
\nFive years ago, Nicola Teal and John Andrea traded a home in south-west London for a remote, 12th-century, six-bedroom castle: its origins go back to the 1100s, but the current building, with its handsome, tall turrets, dates from the 17th century. It later became a ruin, before being rebuilt in the 1980s by an Aberdeen architect. Today, Nicola serves the drinks and gives you the tour, while John cooks your haggis-stuffed Balmoral chicken, local salmon or vegetable moussaka, eaten at the long table in the baronial hall after drinks in the cobbled courtyard garden. Our room – the Balquhain – was spacious, with not one but two turrets. \n
\n Rooms from £240 per night with breakfast; dinner £35 a head; leslie-castle.com
![\"Fit](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/b47327b5aac167df5af2937ebba2b7713ee04d9a/460_186_4137_2482/1000.jpg\")
\nFor many years this 14th-century castle was a ruin in the grounds of another. Renovated in 2013, today it’s truly out of the pages of a fairytale, with an open-plan, beamed living space filled with squishy sofas and games galore. Each main bedroom has its own floor and there’s an outdoor dining area and a balcony from which to gaze out to sea. Best of all is a turret-top, round viewing room, the perfect place for a drink as the sun goes down. And hard-pressed parents will love the castle’s best secret: a rooftop walkway leads to a tiny sauna, the ideal place for some “me” time, just a few steps from the kids.\n
\n Sleeps eight; seven nights from £2,729; cottages.com
![\"Portraits](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/868bdde44a8cfcba77194337172033b7acf2e85d/498_706_6658_3996/1000.jpg\")
\nA big, serious castle with lots of on-site infrastructure (including a falconry and a spa). Our vast room came with an equally vast terrace overlooking rolling hills. Edinburgh, with its summer festivals galore, is a 15-minute drive or bus ride away, and the glorious beach at North Berwick isn’t far either. The highlight of our stay was dinner in the dungeon, now an intimate restaurant serving dishes from local produce. Breakfast in the Orangery restaurant, with the sun shining in through the windows, was delightful too.\n
\n Rooms from £209 per night; dalhousiecastle.co.uk
![\"The,Lews,Castle,In,Stornoway.,View,From,The,Harbor.,WesternThe](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/33238408c639ed22f021da13da70e1e4fccd9d2e/0_0_5951_3572/1000.jpg\")
\nRenovated in 2017 at a cost of £19.5m, this Victorian castle sits grandly above the harbour in the Outer Hebrides. Catch the ferry from Ullapool two and a half hours away, and it’s then a 10-minute stroll. Upstairs has been transformed into bedrooms and apartments – mine had a stunning panorama of the sea, perfect for admiring with a coffee at sunrise. The apartments are penthouse loft-feel with open kitchens; there’s no restaurant, but the on-site café does an excellent breakfast and town is a short walk away.\n
\n Rooms from £185 per night; lews-castle.co.uk
![\"Catch](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/2f79aa32c8204305cbe6284e84ce57f009f067d1/491_818_6776_4066/1000.jpg\")
\nIf there’s one place in Scotland I’ll always return to it’s Kintyre, where Stonefield Castle sits alongside Loch Fyne, one of the country’s most glorious stretches of water. It’s a traditional, imposing castle that combines a delightful and slightly faded interior with a 1970s conservatory – but no sniffing at that, the picture windows are magnificent to sit beside and watch the ever-changing waterscape. Local dishes on the menu include Tarbert crab cakes and mussels, langoustine and scallops from the loch. Woodland walks from the door, and the wondrous world of Kintyre, favourite hideaway of Paul and Linda McCartney, is on your doorstep.\n
\n Doubles from £120 a night; stonefieldcastlehotel.co.uk.
Grand halls, turret views and resident ghosts … From the Borders to the Highlands, these accommodating castles offer bags of history, luxury and escapism
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\nCatholic Women Strike: Global Witness for Equality was launched this month and is calling on women who are regular churchgoers, who work for the church on a voluntary basis or who have paid jobs with Catholic organisations to withhold their labour through Lent next year (5 March to 20 April). “We believe the time is ripe to demand what is right … Instead of waiting for a papal ‘yes’, we issue forth our ‘no’ to the systems of misogyny, sexism and patriarchy,” says the campaign’s website.
\nFor the last three years the Catholic church has been engaged in a worldwide synod on synodality, with people encouraged to take part in meetings at parish and diocesan level to focus on the future of the church. Women’s issues, especially the need to allow women greater leadership roles and give them more of a voice in the running of the church, topped the agenda across the world.
\nPope Francis has twice, in 2016 and 2020, commissioned reports to study the history of women deacons. The findings were not publicised, but it is widely acknowledged that women have performed this role. Many believe that, once women are ordained as deacons, it will only be a question of time before they are also ordained as priests.
\nThe issue is urgent because fewer men, in Europe especially, are coming forward for ordination.
\nMatters came to a head as the synod in Rome ended last month. Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, charged with heading a group on women’s ministry, failed to attend an important meeting on the subject. Then the final synod document appeared to sideline the project, saying: “The question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.”
\n\nKate McElwee of the Women’s Ordination Conference, the body behind the strike plan, said the Vatican’s decision sparked a widespread belief among Catholic women that action is required. “We were founded in 1975, and at that time there was a sense, on the back of the Second Vatican Council, that change would soon happen,” she said. “Over the decades since, there have been many setbacks – but then the synod came along, and we felt inspired, excited and hopeful. Women’s ministry was clearly high on the agenda.”
\nFor the first time in its history, the Women’s Ordination Conference was mentioned by name on the Vatican website. McElwee said: “That seemed to signal change, and that there was room for more.” But over time, hopes of reform have been dashed by a pope and cardinals who turned out to be unwilling to make it central, she said. “It’s felt like a betrayal … it has been heartbreaking. The final document [of the Synod] was disappointing and insufficient and deeply theological, which may not resonate with people in the parishes. It felt hollow. It has all been extremely frustrating … we want to make visible the huge contribution women make to the church,” she said. “If enough women join us, this will make an enormous difference – and we’re working with many organisations across the world.”
\nMiriam Duignan, of the UK-based Catholic Women’s Ordination, said the church was full of women who did its hard work while male priests took the credit. “It’s not good enough,” she said. “There are women who prepare people for the sacraments, such as baptism and marriage, and they do a whole host of other work.Women are already doing priestly work but by virtue of their gender they are never recognised.”
\nDuignan said she believed “the vast majority” of Catholics now realised the injustice of the current set-up, and were in support of change: “The church hierarchy says this is a white, western agenda but it isn’t: the whole world is saying: we want women to be recognised.”
\nPat Brown, a Leeds-based member of Catholic Women’s Ordination, said the church would “fall apart” without women. “The Synod has left many of us feeling angry. They kept saying they would look at the issue of women’s role, but how many hundreds of years do they need to do what is right?”
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/xxxthb","section":"World news","id":"world/2024/nov/24/catholic-women-urged-to-strike-over-betrayal-on-ordination","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/17cb5b8df9ee85c0e1a25e9eff067abb8e60d4c2/0_161_4865_2921/master/4865.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=e9c43af055c1f7e39049eb0c4df48114","height":2921,"width":4865,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Kate McElwee, centre, leads a demonstration in Rome calling for the ordination of women. Photograph: Photograph: Serrano/AGF/Shutterstock","credit":"Serrano/AGF/Shutterstock","altText":"Kate McElwee, centre, leads a demonstration in Rome calling for the ordination of women. ","cleanCaption":"Kate McElwee, centre, leads a demonstration in Rome calling for the ordination of women.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Serrano/AGF/Shutterstock"}],"shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"Pope Francis and cardinals accused of ignoring calls to give women greater leadership roles
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","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Serrano/AGF/Shutterstock"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/24/catholic-women-urged-to-strike-over-betrayal-on-ordination?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/24/catholic-women-urged-to-strike-over-betrayal-on-ordination?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/24/catholic-women-urged-to-strike-over-betrayal-on-ordination?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Article","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Sunbonnet supernova: the ‘fun gal’ who put the glorious Glasgow Boys in the shade","rawTitle":"Sunbonnet supernova: the ‘fun gal’ who put the glorious Glasgow Boys in the shade","item":{"trailText":"Bessie MacNicol was a brilliantly talented artist but, as a woman, she had to go to Paris to paint nudes. Now, after a sensational acquisition, this leading light of the Glasgow Girls is finally getting her day in the sun","body":"About 15 years ago, I was being shown around Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery by an eminent art historian. When we got to the section on the Glasgow Boys – James Guthrie, John Lavery et al, late 19th-century pioneers of the school of naturalistic, plein air painting – I asked a question: where were the Glasgow Girls? The historian practically laughed in my face: didn’t I realise that the Glasgow Boys was an art movement? And they were all men: there were no women.
\nToday, no one doubts the existence of the Glasgow Girls. A few days ago, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh took possession of one of the loveliest works of the women who worked alongside the men at the Glasgow School of Art in the final years of the 19th century.
\n![\"Ushering](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/37e9bfdf416d81e766c915b15105a051e6bac898/0_0_744_1000/744.jpg\")
\n Bessie MacNicol’s The Lilac Sunbonnet (1899) is a light-drenched, joy-filled painting of a girl in the countryside; its deft brushstrokes perfectly capture the dappled rays of sun. Indeed, the work is infused with all that was best in the movement that ushered Scottish painting into the modernist era. It’s now clear that many of the Glasgow Girls were at least as good as the Boys, and some of them were even better.
\nToday the Kelvingrove fittingly boasts the best collection anywhere of the Glasgow Boys: 55 paintings, plus one by their inspiration, the American James McNeill Whistler. By contrast, the Glasgow Girls are represented by just six paintings; two of these, A Girl of the Sixties and Under the Apple Tree, by MacNicol.
\nThe problem, where the Glasgow Girls are concerned, is the same issue curators across the world are facing when it comes to redressing the gender imbalance on their walls. It’s one thing knowing the women were there and painting, but quite another trying to track down their work. Much of MacNicol’s work is in private collections; the acquisition of The Lilac Sunbonnet came about due to a rare instance of her work coming to market.
\nMacNicol attended the Glasgow School of Art for five years from 1887 when she was 18. She was a contemporary there of the MacDonald sisters, as well as Jessie Keppie and Katherine Cameron. They, like the Boys, studied under the groundbreaking directorship of Fra Newbery – but he wasn’t quite groundbreaking enough to allow female students to paint male nudes from life. To gain experience of that, MacNicol had to go to Paris, where in 1892 she signed up at the Académie Colarossi.
\n![\"1oo](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/102e52942b2a2809a81bc6a44fc6714832720d06/0_0_1919_2604/737.jpg\")
\n The school was one of the first to allow women to paint alongside men – but at a price, since they were charged 100 francs a month, twice the fees for their male counterparts. They also had to survive the eccentric Colarossi tradition, whereby the naked male models would skip across the studio before adopting their pose – a practice that had some female students retching at the sight.
\nMacNicol, by all accounts, would have been unfazed: she sounds to have been a fun gal, prone to breaking into a little jig when something took her fancy. She loved music, cycling and fashion, which is what led curator Charlotte Topsfield of the National Galleries of Scotland to suggest recently that the Girl in the Lilac Sunbonnet almost certainly references a novel of the same name by Samuel Rutherford Crockett, which was a massive bestseller at the time, and a fashion influencer.
\nNot yet 30 when she painted The Lilac Sunbonnet, MacNicol should have had a long and successful career ahead. Instead, tragically, she was to die from pre-eclampsia during her first pregnancy, aged 34. Her child also died.
\nA later director of the National Galleries of Scotland, James Caw, would in 1908 describe MacNicol as probably the most accomplished artist her country had ever produced. The Kelvingrove also has a self-portrait: it’s much darker than the sunbonnet painting, and in it MacNicol is unsmiling and serious-looking. She looks as though she wants to tell us something – perhaps we’re still trying to work out what it is.
","atomsCSS":[],"shouldHideReaderRevenue":false,"discussionId":"/p/xv2da4","section":"Art and design","id":"artanddesign/article/2024/jul/16/sunbonnet-glasgow-boys-girls-bessie-macnicol","displayImages":[{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d6f17a75ae816c04f9f04b2ce77935be91749d5d/0_458_4032_2419/master/4032.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d73448b98e895f5225781f18e42c6af3","height":2419,"width":4032,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Plein air pioneer … a detail from Under the Apple Tree by MacNicol. Photograph: Photograph: Artepics/Alamy","credit":"Artepics/Alamy","altText":"A detail from Under the Apple Tree by MacNicol.","cleanCaption":"Plein air pioneer … a detail from Under the Apple Tree by MacNicol.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Artepics/Alamy"}],"shouldHideAdverts":false,"standFirst":"Bessie MacNicol was a brilliantly talented artist but, as a woman, she had to go to Paris to paint nudes. Now, after a sensational acquisition, this leading light of the Glasgow Girls is finally getting her day in the sun
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Now, after a sensational acquisition, this leading light of the Glasgow Girls is finally getting her day in the sun","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d6f17a75ae816c04f9f04b2ce77935be91749d5d/0_458_4032_2419/master/4032.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=d73448b98e895f5225781f18e42c6af3","height":2419,"width":4032,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Artepics/Alamy","altText":"Under the Apple Tree by Bessie MacNicol.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Artepics/Alamy"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/16/sunbonnet-glasgow-boys-girls-bessie-macnicol?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/16/sunbonnet-glasgow-boys-girls-bessie-macnicol?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/16/sunbonnet-glasgow-boys-girls-bessie-macnicol?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Long ignored, at last the surrealist art of Leonora Carrington is getting the attention it’s due","rawTitle":"Long ignored, at last the surrealist art of Leonora Carrington is getting the attention it’s due","item":{"trailText":"The artist and writer is celebrated in a new UK show – but why was a woman of such talent so little known in her lifetime, asks her cousin?","body":"Almost 20 years ago I travelled 5,000 miles to meet my father’s cousin, who had been estranged from our family for 70 years. Back then, Leonora Carrington – though feted in her adoptive country, Mexico – was barely known in her native Britain. She had been as neglected by the art world in general as by her country, and our family.
\nTwo decades on, the story is very different. In April this year, one of her paintings – Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) – was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5m, making her the highest-selling female artist in British history. Over the last few years, shows of her work have been held across the world: in Madrid and Copenhagen, Dublin and Mexico City, and at Tate Liverpool. Next month an exhibition at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, will celebrate her broader work, exploring her output beyond the dream-like canvases of her paintings and the surreal fictional writing for which she is now best known. Because as well as being a painter and writer, Carrington was also a sculptor, a creator of tapestries and jewellery, a maker of lithographs, a playwright and a designer of stage sets and theatre costumes. The Sussex show will include examples of these works, many of which have never been seen before in the UK.
\nIn the 1980s, the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls made an ironic list entitled The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. “Pluses” included: “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80”; and “being included in revised editions of art history”. For Carrington, this has been precisely the case. After my first visit to meet her in Mexico City in 2006, I visited her many more times over the next five years, until her death in 2011 aged 94. We would sometimes joke, sitting round her kitchen table, that one day her works, like those of her erstwhile friend Frida Kahlo, would spawn T-shirts and fridge magnets, tote bags and headscarves.
\n![\"Untitled](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/150e21baf481820b954cc13e85ddc70658a34633/0_0_3142_3178/989.jpg\")
\n It really was a joke, yet today I have all these items and more. Like Kahlo, who was almost unknown at the time of her death in 1954 (her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, was the “famous” artist of the couple), acknowledgement of her status has been a slow burn. The reasons why some artists become sought-after and fashionable is a multi-layered and complex phenomenon. Carrington, like Kahlo, had an extraordinary life story: she ran away from her family and England to join her lover, Max Ernst, in Paris in 1937, becoming the youngest member of a circle that included Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp and Miró. After an idyllic 18 months living with Ernst in a farmhouse in the south of France, that survives to this day, festooned with their artwork, she fled to Spain and, after a terrifying spell in a psychiatric hospital, she escaped war-torn Europe for the US, and then Mexico.
\nAs with Kahlo, Carrington’s work was always intertwined with her own experiences: she once told me that everything she did, both her visual art and her writing, was laced with her biography. Another reason why she is in vogue today is that her concerns – unusual and even eccentric in her own times – are now ubiquitous. Ecology, feminism, the interconnectedness of all life forms, spirituality outside of organised religion: today we’re all aware of these issues, but they were front and centre for Carrington 80 years ago.
\n\n“Great” artists are always experimental; they push boundaries, try out new ideas, shake up the way they do things. They’re not looking for a comfort zone; they’re curious, constantly on the lookout for challenges. All of this was true for Carrington: as her friend and patron Edward James, who was also the main patron of both Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, wrote in an essay in 1975: “She has never relinquished her love of experimentation; the results being that she has been able to diversify and explore a hundred or more techniques for the expression of her creative powers. She continues to try new media which help her to clothe her vital ideas with fresh shapes.”
\nThe new show, which I am curating, will bring together more than 70 pieces of Carrington’s work, many of which have not been seen in the UK before. These include a series of masks made for a theatrical production of The Tempest in the 1950s, as well as a collection of 1974 lithographs of costumes made for a production of S An-sky’s play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, in New York. The exhibition shines a spotlight on Carrington’s work as a playwright: she wrote several plays including Penelope and Judith, both with strong female leads. And her play The Story of The Last Egg, written in 1970, is a precursor to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), foreseeing a world in which greedy overlords have stripped the planet of all its resources, including its women. Only one is left – and she has just one egg.
\nCarrington’s rebel spirit underpins the new exhibition: as a child she was expelled from several convent boarding schools, being admonished by the nuns for failing to co-operate “in either work or play”, she later recalled. Later, when she was launched as a debutante in the London season in 1936, her parents hoped she would find a “suitable” husband: instead, she fell in love with the divorced, remarried, penniless (by Carrington standards) artist Ernst. When she left the family home in Lancashire to join him in Paris, her father Harold warned her that she would no longer be part of the family: she never saw him again.
\nAs the new show explores, her rebelliousness continued throughout her long life: Carrington never fitted in. She railed against the art establishment of Mexico, which was her base for 70 years; she cut her links with the “official” surrealist movement when she left New York in 1942; she courted the attentions of neither art historians nor journalists (if I hadn’t been her cousin, I would never have been welcomed into her life). In her 50s and 60s she spent long periods living alone in New York and Chicago, at times so poor that she later told me she would eat ice-cream because it was the cheapest way to get calories.
\n![\"Leonora](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/8c13c906e3f1e4aa4be9fdf87b0518cf5d900b23/0_0_7860_11231/700.jpg\")
\n In her late 80s and 90s – the period when I knew her – she was rebelling against old age: and since she had already written the story of her later life, via a fictional character called Marian Leatherby, in her novella The Hearing Trumpet, it was a question of life imitating art. The Hearing Trumpet, published 50 years ago in 1974, was penned when Leonora was in her 50s; it describes a fantastical and stereotype-smashing old people’s home, where the residents overturn all conventions to hunt for the Holy Grail, and plan to escape to Lapland with a knitted tent. The Hearing Trumpet’s anniversary is the starting-point for another exhibition opening later this year in Colchester.
\nThroughout her life, Carrington never stopped working: her home in Mexico City, recently restored as a museum that is yet to open to the public, contained a studio, but she worked in all areas of the house. For 10 years in the 1950s, a family of weavers lived there with her and her own family – husband Chiki, a Hungarian photographer who she met and married after arriving in Mexico, and their sons, Gabriel and Pablo. The Newlands House Gallery exhibition will include tapestries from that period. In her final years, unable to paint, she turned to sculpture, focusing on individual figures from her paintings. During the time I knew her, she would intersperse our cups of tea in the kitchen with visits to the garage, where she worked with an assistant on sculptures of weird and wonderful creatures, many of which will be on view at Newlands House Gallery.
\nLeonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary is at Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, Sussex, 12 July–26 October; Leonora Carrington: Avatars and Alliances, is at Firstsite in Colchester, Essex, 26 October–23 February
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Photograph: Photograph: REUTERS/Alamy","credit":"REUTERS/Alamy","altText":"British artist Leonora Carrington in her house in Mexico in 2000.","cleanCaption":"British artist Leonora Carrington in 2000, at the age of 83 – six years before Joanna Moorhead met her.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: REUTERS/Alamy"},"campaigns":[],"designType":"Feature","palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#A1845C","main":"#A1845C","secondary":"#EACCA0","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#A1845C","shadow":"#DCDCDC","immersiveKicker":"#EACCA0","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#A1845C","kickerText":"#A1845C","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#A1845C","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#866D50","featureKickerText":"#E7D4B9","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#6B5840"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#E7D4B9"},"atoms":[]},"trailText":"The artist and writer is celebrated in a new UK show – but why was a woman of such talent so little known in her lifetime, asks her cousin?","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/efe2dc0e2eac35785afe3550a85e2b7ffdbf9013/0_62_2048_1229/master/2048.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=5f287e774658de6d69fd433d1222d6d4","height":1229,"width":2048,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"REUTERS/Alamy","altText":"British artist Leonora Carrington in her house in Mexico in 2000.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: REUTERS/Alamy"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/29/long-ignored-at-last-the-surrealist-art-of-leonora-carrington-is-getting-the-attention-its-due?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/29/long-ignored-at-last-the-surrealist-art-of-leonora-carrington-is-getting-the-attention-its-due?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/29/long-ignored-at-last-the-surrealist-art-of-leonora-carrington-is-getting-the-attention-its-due?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Kelp help? How Scotland’s seaweed growers are aiming to revolutionise what we buy","rawTitle":"Kelp help? How Scotland’s seaweed growers are aiming to revolutionise what we buy","item":{"trailText":"Farmed kelp could produce plastic substitutes, beauty products and food supplements. Just steer clear of seaweed chocolate","body":"Think sun, sea, Skye – and seaweed. It’s early summer off the west coast of Scotland, and Alex Glasgow is landing a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm. It emerges on what looks like a washing line heavy with dirty rags, hoicked up from the depths. And yet, this slippery, shiny, salty substance might, just might, be going to save the planet.
\nWhen it comes to sustainability, seaweed is about as shipshape as it gets. Minimal damage to the environment, check. No use of pesticides, check. Diversifies ocean life, check. Uses no land, check. And, in the case of Skye’s seaweed farm, spoils no one’s view, check.
\n![\"Kyla](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/81c61fc4b9195ac4826a9579cafb455a4743e230/459_0_7797_5198/1000.jpg\")
\n Kyla Orr and Martin Welch of KelpCrofters check the crop from their boat
\n![\"Kelp](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/31221d727ee84899ef3f319f6ee5d43b73a7844c/0_0_5504_6880/800.jpg\")
\n ![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/2f8d94301f92e1ed5c6bbbba61dbab743f28a6b7/0_744_5504_6880/800.jpg\")
\n Kelp thrives in the clear waters around Skye; a marker buoy shows the seaweed farm’s location
\nIndeed, a few minutes earlier, as we sped across the Inner Sound between Skye’s second-biggest settlement, Broadford, reputedly the birthplace of Drambuie, and the tiny island of Pabay, it was hard to work out the seaweed farm’s location. Eventually the boat slows as we near a few floats bobbing around on the water. They are the only visible sign that anything is happening here, yet below the surface is an underwater grid stretching 500 metres by 200 metres, growing about 8km worth of lines of kelp. The annual yield of seaweed, Glasgow explains, is now about seven tonnes. “It’s perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet,” he says. “At this time of year, peak growing season, it can double its size in a fortnight – so five tonnes of seaweed today will be 10 in two weeks.”
\n![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/757ba0d3d6827fc226de21c01712561ff4c9da2b/77_28_4881_6721/726.jpg\")
\n Seaweed of all types has been collected on Britain’s beaches for centuries
\nPhotographer Christian Sinibaldi and I are here as part of a trip organised by the WWF to focus attention on Scotland’s burgeoning seaweed industry – what it is now, and what it could become. This unremarkable patch of water is the starting point: Glasgow and his partners, Martin Welch and Kyla Orr, set up this seaweed farm, KelpCrofters, four years ago. Like many we’ll meet in the seaweed business, they’ve migrated here from other industries: Glasgow worked in forestry, Welch in fishing, Orr in fisheries management. Like others in this business, they say they’ve come to work in seaweed because they want to feel optimistic about the future of the environment – and with seaweed, there’s a lot to feel optimistic about.
\nMost of the past four years, says Glasgow, have been spent adapting machinery and devising mechanisms to allow the seaweed not only to grow, but to be harvested and transported efficiently to shore. Glasgow is a wiry 54-year-old with an air of schoolboyish adventure about him: there’s a frontier feel to this industry. He spends his days trying to work out solutions to teething troubles no one has ever had to think about before – not in this part of the world anyway.
\nSeaweed isn’t a new product in the west of Scotland: in the Hebrides it has been collected on beaches for centuries, and used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making. In the 19th century it was used for iodine, making the city of Glasgow the world centre of its production.
\nBut the difference then was that the seaweed had grown naturally, and harvesting was basically foraging, sometimes chest-deep in water at low tide. KelpCrofters is different: this is cultivated seaweed farming, with the potential for industrial-sized yields. The kelp-seeded lines are “planted” in the autumn, left to germinate through the winter, and harvested, as we’re seeing today, after the peak growing season in May and June. Between planting and harvesting, little input is required.
\n“Seaweed has everything it needs – no fertilisers, pesticide or land required. We just leave it to grow and while it’s growing it’s also providing a habitat for fish – and it’s cleaning the water of harmful heavy metals,” says Orr.
\nBut here’s the rub with seaweed: no one knows what’s going to happen next. “There’s a bottleneck – we’ve been bringing too much of it ashore,” says Orr. “We’re focusing now on what happens when we get it out of the water.”
\n![\"Kyla](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/6a9892ca4a1a360eafb41a41f1f28266c09e6736/0_0_7434_4956/1000.jpg\")
\n Kyla Orr and Alex Glasgow delivering their crop to Eco Cascade for processing
\nThere are all sorts of potential uses for seaweed, from plastic substitutes to beauty products to food supplements, and many more besides. The problem is, it’s far from clear which pathway will take off big-time – and that has all sorts of implications for its development as an industry, starting with: when should the seaweed even be harvested?
\n“You bring the crop in earlier if it’s for food use, later if it will be used for fertilisers or packaging,” says Glasgow.
\nA few miles away inKyle of Lochalsh, Alison Baker and Jemima Cooper of Eco Cascade are standing by to receive the KelpCrofters harvest. Baker, who previously ran a plastic-free fashion label, founded Eco Cascade in 2022 to explore ways of taking seaweed to its next stage. At first, she says, the idea was to dry it.
\n![\"Two](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/3c6649e3198679a3cd87d8bf8e5299783a5f6f88/0_0_7963_5309/1000.jpg\")
\n Jemima Cooper and Alison Baker of Eco Cascade, a seaweed processing facility in Kyle of Lochalsh
\n![\"Specimens](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/afd637b93a5309c2e93125d575e47df9deff86f3/0_2248_5027_5027/1000.jpg\")
\n ![\"Artists](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/baa1da5a2c13901bdee6e7c91e2335fa7a3180a9/853_0_5416_5416/1000.jpg\")
\n Specimens growing in a lab at the Scottish Association for Marine Science; artists Harland Miller and Emma Talbot have been commissioned by WWF to produce work linked to the seaweed industry
\n“But that’s very energy intensive and though it could be good for some uses – food use, for example – we’re now more interested in preserving it wet, or putting it straight into a fermenting process to preserve the nutrients in a liquid,” she says.
\nLiquid or dried, what happens to it next is the focus at Oceanium in Oban, a three-hour drive down the coast, which is our next port of call. Like everyone else in this story, no one at Oceanium (company slogan: “Kelp the World”) knows exactly how seaweed is going to revolutionise the future of the planet, but they’re convinced that somehow, it will.
\n![\"Dr](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/0f2e29454d84aa47ad5c5bb1537ed511d706bc20/1551_444_3530_4413/800.jpg\")
\n ![\"A](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/1bead34a1788c8d14a148402d862614aec243cab/0_860_4765_5957/800.jpg\")
\n Dr Mariam Aigbe, Oceanium’s technical services manager – foods, with some of the bread she made; a sample of the products made by Oceanium, which include food supplements and face cream
\nWe’re fed bread made from seaweed washed down by seaweed smoothies – I’m pretty sure this isn’t the future, and am grateful to hear attempts to develop chocolate made from seaweed have been axed because it tasted too awful. However, research on seaweed-based face creams is looking good (they can reduce redness, it seems, and may have anti-ageing properties), and there’s excitement over possibilities of using seaweed to make the film that covers dishwasher pods, as well as adding nutrients to food supplements.
\nThe product that most piques the interest of two of my companions, Emma Talbot and Harland Miller, is ink made from seaweed: they are artists recruited by the WWF to produce work linked to the seaweed industry for a project called Art For Your Oceans. They’re each given bottles of the ink to take home, so watch this space. The big questions around seaweed continue to drift, but the art is coming soon. And eventually, the answers – from which we all stand to benefit – will be on the end of the line as well.
\n![\"Two](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/30cb420943952d4b03edaff80dae789b473000ca/0_0_8256_4954/1000.jpg\")
\n A piece of seaweed is held up to the sun: many in the industry predict a bright future for the fast-growing, sustainable natural resource
\nFarmed kelp could produce plastic substitutes, beauty products and food supplements. Just steer clear of seaweed chocolate
\nBeside the Grand Canal, on a wall of the palazzo she called home for 30 years, a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim fizzes with her larger-than-life personality, a personality that once reverberated between these walls, and across Venice. In the painting, Peggy wears a pair of her signature outsize sunglasses, and clutches three of her beloved Lhasa Apsos terriers. Today, Peggy’s palazzo is a museum housing the art collection she amassed from the 1930s to the 1970s, featuring work by everyone from Picasso to Pollock, Ernst to Kandinsky, Duchamp to Tanguy, all of whom she knew and many of whom she slept with. The portrait hangs outside the office of the museum’s director, who happens also to be Peggy’s fiercest critic. She is Karole Vail, daughter of Peggy’s son, Sindbad.
\nVail has been director of the Venice Guggenheim (known as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection; there are related Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao) since 2017, and it’s fair to say that her take on her grandmother is mired in the belief that, while Peggy was a superlative art collector, she left much to be desired as a mother and grandmother. “She was obsessed with the men in her life: she never focused on her children in the way they needed,” says Vail.
\nLovers, and art, came first with Peggy Guggenheim: but just as Vail has reaped the benefits of her grandmother’s passions in her professional life, she has mourned her neglect of her family in her personal life. And yet there was a moment, Vail concedes, when Peggy really did try to give family her best shot. That episode took place far from the glamorous Venice with which she is most associated, and a long way from the New York where she was raised. It happened in a leafy corner of Hampshire, and this summer, Petersfield Museum will play host to an exhibition focusing on this little-known period in Peggy’s biography, with works by Ernst, Tanguy and Henry Moore lent by the Venice Guggenheim.
\n![\"Peggy](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/523d576897d5ae8fb66417b5299317e6ccd3b92e/0_0_442_594/372.jpg\")
\n In 1934, Peggy’s life – which had already been punctuated by dramas and tragedies, including her father Benjamin’s death on the Titanic, the death of her sister Benita in childbirth, and the loss of her other sister Hazel’s two young sons who fell from the top of a New York skyscraper in 1928 – was again in meltdown. She had been living in Devon; her marriage to Laurence Vail, father of her two children, had ended acrimoniously – and her next love affair, with literary critic John Holms, had ended suddenly with his death during what should have been a routine operation, when he failed to come round from the anaesthetic. However, Peggy was never without a lover for long, and she soon began a new relationship with the communist writer Douglas Garman. In her autobiography, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, she relates almost as an aside that she had decided to end her life, so when the couple decided to buy a place to live in Hurst, just over the Sussex-Hampshire border near Petersfield: “I put the house in Garman’s name as I intended to die.” But in the next sentence the story changes abruptly: “Of course I didn’t [die] and I went to live in the house instead.”
\nHer new home was called Yew Tree Cottage, though Peggy describes it as having four bedrooms and two sitting rooms, one with a fireplace so big you could sit in it. By her standards, though, it was “small”: the big appeal was the grounds, which ran to an acre, with a stream running through. The reason for moving to Hurst was that her daughter, Pegeen, two years younger than Sindbad, wanted to attend the same school as Garman’s daughter, and Hurst was on the right bus route.
\n\nAt first, it was just Peggy and Pegeen – and a maid, of course – at Yew Tree Cottage. After the divorce from Laurence Vail, Sindbad had gone to live with his father and his new wife; this separation of the siblings was one of many decisions that Karole Vail believes made life extremely difficult for her father and her aunt. But then Garman and his daughter, Debbie, moved in with Peggy; and it was at this point that Peggy seems to have discovered an unlikely new side to herself. In her autobiography she describes how she was, once again, the mother of two children; and this time, she seems to have enjoyed it more. She threw herself, against all odds, into domesticity.
\nThough Vail is not inclined to praise of any kind when it comes to her grandmother, she does concede that the five years Peggy spent in Hampshire show her in a different light. She was, Vail believes, “trying to find herself – she was figuring herself out, trying to understand herself better. She was trying to be domestic; she had been raised by nannies and governesses. Maybe she wanted to be a hands-on mother, and just didn’t know how.” In her autobiography, Peggy describes herself in these years as being so domestic she did little more than look after Pegeen and Debbie: she describes a simple, home-based life in which she read to the children before bedtime, watched them act out little plays in outfits from the dressing-up box, and cared for them when they were sick. For Peggy, it was almost certainly the nearest she ever got, in a life that would stretch across nine decades, to something like a “normal” existence.
\n![\"Henry](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/d12e454e0ff44cbbaad60d8d94a47def6e9f6510/0_413_5171_3102/1000.jpg\")
\n It didn’t last. Peggy and Garman were, as she recorded in her diary, “fighting all day, f… all night”. She went to Paris, to stay in the Hotel Crillon; and it was in Paris at the end of 1937 that she met her next lover, Samuel Beckett, who “spoke very seldom and never said anything stupid”. He came to stay one weekend at Yew Tree Cottage. Up to this point Peggy had preferred paintings by old masters; Beckett told her “one had to accept the art of our day as if it was a living thing”. With this, her life’s work was set: “She went on to devote her life to something very different [from her family],” says Vail. “And that was art.”
\n\nPeggy became one of the most important figures in the 20th-century art world, a renowned collector who managed to snap up hundreds of works by big-name artists on the eve of the second world war. In 1938 she opened what would be a landmark London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, and the Petersfield exhibition will explore how she began to plan that from Yew Tree Cottage. She would go on to found a gallery in New York, where her proteges included Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, before moving to live in Venice, where she bought her palazzo and filled it with paintings, collages and sculptures.
\nAnd yet for Vail, born in 1958 and raised in Paris, her famous grandmother was rarely mentioned. “My father hardly ever talked about Peggy. There had been so many difficulties, and their relationship was fraught – he and Pegeen had suffered badly with the divorce.” Her father wanted to shield her from the fallout of a high-profile grandmother whose life was often seen as outrageous – Peggy said she had more than 1,000 lovers in her time, and was more than forthcoming about her sex life in her autobiography, and in general conversation.
\n![\"Peggy](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/3a58d8c66b2908fde8c9c94308a21c948ad10373/0_0_3437_5145/668.jpg\")
\n Vail agrees that there’s value in a woman, especially in Peggy’s era, being so candid and straightforward about things that were often hardly mentioned. But that didn’t make her a good grandmother, she says. “We would come to stay in Venice, here in the palazzo, sporadically for holidays,” she recalls, “but it was never very child-friendly.” Later, in her teenage years, Vail spent some time there without her parents. “I don’t have particularly fond memories of Peggy from that time. She was a bit overwhelming and she would ask very direct and embarrassing questions – it was terrible for a young teenager, to have your grandmother asking about your sexuality and your boyfriends, often with other people listening.”
\n![\"Sycamore](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/8c18002537fbfb4bfd9cd27c9c4d70bb6ed7f6ec/0_0_2214_2411/918.jpg\")
\n After school, Vail studied at Durham University, then lived in Florence for 12 years, where she worked in publishing. “But I couldn’t ignore my grandmother for ever,” she says. For the centenary of Peggy’s birth, in 1998, she pitched a show to the New York Guggenheim, and then got a job there, working her way up from being a curatorial assistant. In 2017, when the directorship of Guggenheim Venice became vacant, “the opportunity felt too good to be true”. Married to the abstract painter Andrew Huston – who pops into her office briefly during our chat to collect the couple’s Irish terrier, Briccolo, who’s been sitting quietly beside the desk – Vail says she has always needed to earn her living, and had long been a fan of the collection her grandmother amassed. She doesn’t dodge the difficult issues. “There’s always the question of nepotism [but] I always worked hard and that was recognised. There were many candidates for the job and I was deemed the right person to do it.”
\nThe grandmother she spent so long trying to avoid is, of course, ever present: but these days, Vail says, she often forgets Peggy is a relative at all. She doesn’t feel she has much in common with her: she admires her sense of style, she says, but it’s very different from her own way of dressing (when we meet, she’s in smart slacks and a pullover – far from the ostentatious, brightly coloured outfits Peggy was photographed wearing). “I feel I’ve connected with the best of her,” she says. “ I care very much about the collection, and I hope she’d be pleased and happy that one of her grandchildren is looking after it for her.”
\nPeggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo opens at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, Hampshire, on 15 June
\nThe socialite and collector prioritised art over family and claimed she had 1,000 lovers. But a new UK exhibition tells another tale – that of the five years she spent in Hampshire and Sussex leading a relatively ordinary life, as her granddaughter explains
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But one week after graduating, she got married and gave up art for raising children. Now, at the age 80, she is revisiting her bold degree show work in a beguiling Edinburgh exhibition","body":"When Pauline Caulfield graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1968, her bold, brightly coloured, screenprinted panels were considered by some to be the strongest pieces in that year’s show. At that point, the textile artist’s name was still Pauline Jacobs but, one week after graduating, she married the artist Patrick Caulfield, seven years her senior. The two had met a few years earlier when he was her tutor at the Chelsea School of Art in London. “My fellow graduates were working out what they wanted to do and how they were going to afford to live,” she says. “And I was buying champagne and choosing a dress for the wedding.”
\n\n![\"Pauline](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/c06627e4b02c2bd7d6efa447d2ea7259e888a56f/0_0_1000_1500/667.jpg\")
\n The marriage lasted a little over 20 years, during which time the couple had three sons and were at the centre of the glittering London art set. “John Hoyland was our close friend and neighbour,” she says. “We knew people like Peter Blake and David Hockney. I was overawed by all this greatness – I was happy not to have to put my head over the parapet. No one stopped me from making art, but I was busy raising the children – and that’s how it went on, for decades.”
\nThen Patrick left her for another artist, Janet Nathan, whom he would marry and remain with until his death in 2005. It was, Caulfield says, “a catalyst”. She had never entirely given up her craft and now she felt its pull. “I knew I wanted to go back to art,” she says – not full time, though, because she needed to earn money. So for 25 years, she combined art with working as a receptionist and then a librarian. And then, 10 years ago, she was made redundant: another catalyst. More than half a century after being one of the brightest stars of the Royal College of Art, Caulfield’s moment had come: she became a full-time artist. And this week, a show of her work opens at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.
\nPoignantly, eight of the pieces in the show are remakes from her original 1968 Royal College collection: pairs of screenprints including Airmail, edged with the trademark red and blue edging of an airmail missive; Bunting, a riot of turquoise spiked with cherry red; and Garden, grass-green bordered with flower-coloured blocks of orange, yellow and blue. “When I came back to it, I decided to remake everything from my graduation collection,” says Caulfield. “It felt like I was completing something I’d started years ago. I still loved the work.” Glance at her website and you’ll see why: those 1968 pieces are as breathtaking now as they were then. There is also a film about her latest piece, Noren Curtain, powder blue intersected with pink wavy lines.
\nAnother work in the Edinburgh show is more curious: a priest’s chasuble, bright red with wavy blue lines, looking as much like a poncho as a religious vestment. Caulfield was raised Catholic – her parents were converts, friends of Evelyn Waugh in fact – and when she returned to her art, she made vestments for, among others, the Catholic bishop of Plymouth, Christopher Budd. As well as the red chasuble, Caulfield was very keen to borrow another, a stunning gold number, one of her favourite ever pieces of vestment art. But when she asked the diocesan offices in Plymouth if she could borrow it, word came back that it wouldn’t be possible: Budd had loved it so much that, when he died last year, he was buried in it.
\n![\"Pauline](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/f1665036b5f6d8714d59059395b9694a5c069628/37_38_660_712/463.jpg\")
\n Today, Caulfield is much in demand for her stunning wall hangings and statement curtains: when I visit her studio-cum-home in London, she shows me how she creates her pieces, spreading pigment on to giant pieces of canvas like icing on a cake. Strong colour is everywhere in this house where she lived with Patrick for so long, and where he created his art as well.
\nCaulfield seems way younger than her 80 years – which is good, she says, given that she’s still at the dawn of her career. Does she feel, as her reputation blooms late in the day, that she should have taken the initiative earlier and not left the stage to Patrick? “Absolutely not. I was the person who drove the car and organised the birthday parties and looked after the children, and I enjoyed all of that. I’m certainly very glad I had Patrick in my life. I wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise.”
\nAll the same, she remembers during her schooldays setting down what she wanted to do with her life. “I wrote a big A then three possibilities: author, artist and actress.” While she didn’t write M for mother or W for wife, she enjoyed those roles. Now, in her ninth decade, she’s back to A for artist.
\n• Pauline Caulfield Textiles is at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 8 March to 20 July
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