A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN : WOMEN IN STILL LIFE

Virginia Woolf has written a thousand quotable lines and A Room of One's Own is undeniably one of her most enduring works. It is lyrical and serene, tumultuous, sharp. Almost 100 years have passed since Woolf was asked to speak on women and fiction, and though her treatment of race, class and imperialism are problematic today, to dismiss her work would be an opportunity lost. (Dhar, Spring 2020) Woolf's insights continue to dart as the waters muddy and her small fish never leaves the reader; rather it grows and wants recatching by Woolf's successors. The inheritance that Woolf wishes for her predecessors and celebrates for her contemporaries, she offers now. We may take every first book, to be the "last volume in a fairly long series, continuing all those other books… For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately." (Woolf, 2002) On the occasion of this exhibition, A Room of One's Own - Women in Still Life, we accept Woolf's century old invitation and cross the threshold anew. We set out with Robin Blaser, as he reiterates, that "[T]he world of twentieth-century thought involves a huge companionship."  Writing on Charles Olsen's poetry and 20th century philosophy, Blaser is captured by the motif of violets in Olsen's work-recurrent, and yet, spectacularly new. As he knows that the most important works of poetry and poetics "are arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology. Over and over again"the violets that bloom in Olsen's poetry -just as they delighted Olsen in his neighbourhood-never fail to delight Blaser, even as he expects them to appear. (Blaser, 2006)

A Room of One's Own - Women in Still Life, is testament to the necessity of art to reinvent through companionship. It is a celebration of our growing inheritance, and a reminder that it is radical to make as artists, readers, writers, women. The exhibition brings together 16 artists, Rachel Milne, Elizabeth Barnett, Katherine Hattam, Amy Cuneo, Melanie Vugich, Kiata Mason, Fiona Cotton, Sally Anderson, Nicole O'Loughlin, Peggy Zephyr, Irene Briant, Pamela Pauline, Myfanwy Gulifer, Natasha Jumanee, Honor Freeman and Jess Dare. The room is riotous with colour and texture, light climbs a hundred stems, lays itself across a hundred tables, pierces glass, slices shadow. Emma Goldman rings in my ears If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution! Joy is furious! We recognise these rooms, these books, these vases, these plants, these sardine tins- Fede Galizia, Rachel Ruysch, Margaret Preston, Vanessa Bell, Fiona Hall- as Olsen does the re-springing violets. A Room of One's Own - Women in Still Life is composed from a history of rooms. It is a call for a room for each, but it is more poignantly a call for room for us all. 16 artists' private spaces open; dine, read, rest at their tables "….feel the light fall on yourself, see coming your way a piece of strange food-knowledge, adventure, art… reach out for it." (Woolf, 2002) Each of these works is an invitation into the uncanny-mysterious, new, but anciently familiar-and every time the light shifts or the century ticks over, they look and feel different and somehow the same. A Room of One's Own - Women in Still Life is 16, 26, 6 million rooms that we know, not because we have objectively been there, but because we come to know our infinitely new selves only amongst others. Not for the spectacle of novelty, but to offer what we know newly to our sisters and to our daughters. To know is a particular thing for the feminist artist, scholar or writer. Poet and theorist Joan Retallack describes a place; a know ledge. An escarpment from which to leap, where a bend, or a swerve is possible or perhaps necessary. She writes,

The language of knowing (as distinct from believing, and remembering) is tied to what we care about now and intend to value in the future... On the know ledge, on the verge of awareness, in the mIdst of unintelligIbility, there's room for accident and possibility: in medias race of the orderly fall of atoms, there comes the Eve of the swerve. (Retallack, 2003)  

The know ledge is a place of our own. A place for making value because recording one's own history will always be a radical act. Rebecca Birrell suggests so too in, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century published in 2021. Birrell seeks an affinity with Woolf's sentiment as she chronicles six artists' reclamation of still life painting from their male counterparts and from the prejudice that befalls the genre throughout history. What Still Life held in the 14th and 15th centuries, it still holds-space for the unique perspectives of women that do not rely on the mirroring of men-an offer of intimacy, self-definition, situated knowledge. (Haraway, 1988) Women have always embraced the possibility of bending things, however subtly, to adjust their course. Woolf discovers it in Mary Carmichael's Life's Adventure, she feels "as one feels on a switchback railway when the car, instead of sinking, as one has been led to expect, swerves up again." (Woolf, 2002) Retallack's swerve; "redirecting geometries of attention," toward "creating usable pasts." (Retallack, 2003) An unexpected curve, but also a near miss, something other than a straight line, that has the revolutionary quality of risk at its core. Think of Woolf's circles, the ones that she scratches furiously to obscure the portrait of the Professor von X. Cartwheels and circles that transform misogynist anger into burning bushes and comets of feminist fury. Woolf winds small circles of hot rage into million-year-old ice-covered rocks and then she redirects their orbit. Springing from her inheritance as a violet.

A Room of One's Own - Women in Still Life gives us newly, the fall of light, the title of a book, the inclusion of a fish, a flower, or a fox, swerves change a life, still or otherwise. Swerves that push us from believing or remembering, to knowing that we belong in the space of invention, or risk, of redirection "…all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping." (Woolf, 2002)

            Suddenly the spring field is blue, of figwort

            and the callacanthus smell is intercepted by that color

            as the dogwood was by the green of my pleasure

            that I slept under it, for an hour, and woke,

            as they have, to the rising of

            the forces

Excerpt from Charles Olson's

For a Man Gone to Stuttgart Who Left an Automobile Behind Him, 1953.

- Sarah Jones, 2023

Blaser, R. (2006). "The Violets: Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead". In e. M. Nichols, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dhar, D. (Spring 2020). Teaching Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in a Feminist Classroom: An Intersectional, Transnational Perspective. Feminist Formations, 32(1), 159-164.

Haraway, D. (1988, Autumn). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.

Olson, C. (1953). Charles Olson's "For a Man Gone to Stuttgart Who Left an Automobile Behind Him". Retrieved October 2023, from Jacket Magazine: http://jacketmagazine.com/38/jwb02-olson-for-a-man.shtml

Retallack, J. (2003). The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Woolf, V. (2002). A Room of One's Own. Penguin Adult.