To enter a shop alone as a mid-twentieth century child is as complex as a peace treaty. They are not friendly spaces. They have codes as mysterious as going unarmed into the liar of a wild animal, challenged to fight in a duel, ordered to dance a minuet, negotiate a treaty, perform a ritual of gift exchanges in a foreign land and language
How a female artist’s art school notes are obscured by motherhood in the 1970s ‘Our Generation’ is the subtext of my work, women artists of the 1970s reclaiming our place in popular culture. I am preparing another theme for Our … Read More
1971 – I was fourteen and we found a storage hut at school, next to the tennis court. We climbed in and nicked a few costumes. These were vintage clothes used for school plays. I stole a little black cape … Read More
What I especially like about the concept of The Harrowing of Hell is that Jesus needs to be busy busy. He can’t actually be dead during those three days. He has to rescue all those poor souls in hell since … Read More
My postcards included in Above and Below exhibition show photographs of me as a small child taken in Brixham. The original images were taken on Brixham Harbourside and Mansands Beach Brixham in the late 1950s and 1960s. I have collaged … Read More
A baby is greeted like the second coming and little rituals of worship take place amongst the banal secular ritual of cooking and cleaning in the miserable 1960s. In big families child care is duty, no matter what aspirations and … Read More
www.beckynuttall.com ‘I am not a romantic‘ is a work on the theme of gender, identity, fashion, art, literature, popular culture, history and feminism These are the images that influenced the work; John Keats: The first Romantic poet I read when … Read More
In my adolescence, I visited the artist in a London flat. There was a room designated for the studio; I could not smell turps or white spirit; I could not see a Francis Bacon tsunami licking the prosaic off the … Read More
She was a Catholic and the first person I knew with a florescent Virgin Mary statue; maybe there’s something in this Catholicism, I thought, if you need a green glow to help you through the night. We loved the Monkees … Read More
Did you ever do something good as a child only to be told stuff like “you’ll get your reward in Heaven”? No thanks, especially if a nun is on reward duty; it will be slim pickings for the protestants … Read More
“What is art, Herr Schwitters” “What isn’t?” This was my opening quote in the art history exam in 1973. Kurt, neatly summing up the conceptualist ideology of 1970s art schools. For all of its egalitarian symbolism, Kurt’s quote was embedded … Read More
In 2021 I was asked to contribute to an exhibition in Hereford. I researched the year 1971 for the painting ‘The anchorhold 1971’ I used a version of a toy theatre and painted anchorholds in the theatre boxes, women kept … Read More