Landmarks 75/25: 50 years of the Women’s Art Register <Report >
6–28 March 2025
George Paton Gallery
Level 1, Arts and Cultural Building
University of Melbourne
Over 100 guests attended the opening of Landmarks 75/25: 50 years of the Women's Art Register and An Embroidered Memoir by Meredith Rogers at the George Paton Gallery on Thursday 6 March. The exhibition launched W.A.R.'s 50th-anniversary celebrations and the launch of the 2025 poster by Katie Sfretkidis.
In the first exhibition space, Meredith Rogers’ embroideries were exhibited alongside a collection of works created in the 1970s by Bonita Ely, Lesley Dumbrell, Janine Burke, Erica McGilchrist, Elizabeth Gower, Anna Sande and Isabel Davies, who were instrumental in the founding W.A.R. In the second space, works by committee members and volunteers from the last two years were exhibited, plus ephemera from the archive and a timeline of WAR's 50-year history. Landmarks 75/25 honoured the artist-driven foundation of W.A.R. and illustrated the diverse expertise spanning art, design, conservation, education, writing and curation that continues to shape its legacy and ensure its future.
Exhibitors: Leia Alex, Sandra Bridie, Louisa Bufardeci, Janine Burke, Sophie Calalesina, Virginia Coventry, Anna Daly, Isabel Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Bonita Ely, Kirsty Gorter, Elizabeth Gower, Danni Hamilton, Gail Harradine, Annabell Lee, Christina Turner, Sahra Martin, Emma McAnelly, Erica McGilchrist, Claudia Phares, Caroline Phillips, Robyn Pridham, Susie Raz, Merren Ricketson, Anna Sande, Katie Sfetkidis, Brianna Simonsen, Kate Smith, Azza Zein.
Catalogue design by Sahra Martin.
Speeches from Opening Night:
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May I echo Channon's (GPG's Director's) words in acknowledging Elders past present and emerging who are custodians of these lands which had never been ceded.
May I also acknowledge and honour all the women who came before us … those many women who worked on the feminist project who support and inspire us to go on, sadly many of whom are no longer with us.
On behalf of Meredith Rogers, Landmarks co-curator Kirsty Gorter, and the WAR Committee, I welcome everyone and thank you for coming. A sincere and warm thank you to all the artists for your participation and sharing your work.
The Women's Art Register is extremely fortunate to be launching our 50th Anniversary in conjunction with Meredith Rogers's stunning exhibition 'An Embroidered Memoir'.
This intriguing, inviting set of 74 stitched panels provides a focal point for these two shows about memory, layering, resonance and connection.
Isn't it incredible to think that Meredith and Kitty Rubbo, and the women who exhibited in this part of the space started the Register 50 years ago at the GPG at its former location?
And how wonderful to see their works from the 70s together - thanks again to Meredith! And reflect on the careers that these women have had and the impact they continue to make in the Australian arts arena.
Could they have even imagined what the Register might become all those years ago?
Could they have foreseen that now the archive represents over 5000 Australian-based artists in documentation folders, digital formats, publications and ephemera - all accessible for viewing for curators, researchers, educators, academics, and of course other artists?
WAR has also been designated as a Collection of National significance in Australia and believe along with the Feminist Library in London it is perhaps one 2 the oldest feminist archives surviving from the 70s in the world....
The work in the second space here reflects the energy and skills of the many women who keep the Register running today. A cross-generational group of artists, designers, curators, conservators, archivists, administrators, and educators.
Because the Register is more than an archive - it is a community of predominantly women - and I must acknowledge the men and partners who have supported the Register, well been dragged in, in some cases, over the years in various ways....
A community of volunteers and members committed to their sister artists.
So many people helped bring this exhibition together - please see the catalogue.
And of course, there are too many people to thank here who have contributed to the thousands and thousands of volunteer hours dedicated to their sister artists, building the archive and the community that surrounds and sustains it.
And, talking about women who have made invaluable contributions to the Australian art scene, to education and to the Feminist project it’s now my great pleasure to introduce Dr Anne Marsh.
Anne is a Professorial Research Fellow at the VCA. Most here would be aware Her incredible book: Doing Feminisms: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia (2021) is unique in the role it plays in Feminist art history, a mammoth undertaking that stands as a testament to Australia’s rich feminist art history. Anne’s work covers booms on performance and photography, artists, essays and major projects focussing on all aspects of contemporary art.
Thank you for being here Anne, and for your ongoing support of WAR.
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The Women’s Art Register is a legend in Melbourne and in Australia, it claims to be one off the longest running visual arts and document archive of Australian women artists and those identifying as women, in the world. That is some achievement. This year represents the Register’s 50th Anniversary, and these two exhibitions mark the beginning of the celebrations that will continue throughout the year long program of events.
Meredith Rogers work opens the exhibition. A wall of uniformly sized stitched works each documenting one year of the artist’s life experience from her early childhood to the present. Meredith’s work holds the exhibitions together in some respects as she demonstrates an art- as-life feminist methodology.
It’s wonderful to see Janine Burke’s portraits of Elizabeth Gower, Sue Ford, Lesley Dumbrell and Jenny Watson that she first published in her book Personal View in 2011. Janine’s photographs are shown here with Virginia Coventry’s classic black and white suburban house and Anna Sande’s series Hardtimes. Sande’s work has been overlooked by art history probably because the social documentary genre didn’t survive well in Melbourne under the rhetoric of postmodernism.
Virginia Coventry, Isobel Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Elizabeth Gower, Bonita Ely, and Erica McGilchrist are now part of a national roll call of great Australian women artists. They are acknowledged as significant contributors to the feminist art project internationally and collected by major museums. They exhibit here as long-term members of the Women’s Art Register alongside mid-career, younger and emerging artists, activists and archivists who have volunteered at The Register over the last two years and kept the archive alive. Together they create a feminist inspired curatorial approach.
The Women’s Art Register is a not- for-profit organisation run by volunteers and it embraces a collective governance that relies on negotiation, consensus and collaboration.
What I found compelling when I was involved in the Women’s Art Movement in Adelaide in the 70s and early 80s was the way in which it embraced archival work as a way of documenting the achievements of women. We need to keep on doing this work: collecting, exhibiting, recording and writing. Some of this may get neglected or lost but any art historian will tell you that archival work is full of surprises. Over and over again through decades and centuries things have been recovered. The work of feminist art historians demonstrates this. I’m currently helping a PhD candidate in Adelaide who is analysing The Post-Object Art Archive at Flinders University Museum of Art and engaged in a project to insert the women artists who were left out of the collection due to patriarchal bias or sexism.
It’s good to remember when we do our work that history is written in the present. We are actively engaged with making art history every day. And we now have the tools and the knowledge to go back and correct the historical record, to re-make that history. History is alive – it’s a living thing.
The methodology embraced by the Women’s Art Movements across the globe - to include all women artists regardless of established patriarchal markers of excellence has always been, in my mind, a powerful approach because it represents an inclusive feminism, one that has survived for decades. This still upsets some people, especially the mainstream which has a clear idea of the western patriarchal canon of art history and history in general. The Women’s Art Movements, in opposition and in rebellion, realised that there were many art worlds. They famously embraced women’s craft and all the ways of being and achieving as an artist in the home, on the streets, in the artist run initiatives and experimental art spaces, in the galleries and museums.
In the two parts of this exhibition, we see this practice of inclusion. Here established artists who have been recognised by the canon are exhibited alongside others who are emerging or who resist the canon and/or both, and others who have been over looked. There is an intergenerational give and take, a learning that is demonstrated and active.
Both the exhibitions have a reference to everyday life, the domestic, time, pattern and repetition. There are also works referencing the body, motherhood, and sexual identity that stress the entwining of the personal and political as a strong axis in feminist art practice. Motherhood has always been a strong feminist theme and it echoes through the generations of this exhibition beginning with Meredith Rogers’ stitched diary entries where mothering is entwined with her professional work, and continuing in Landmarks with photographs by Claudia Pharès and stitched works by Kirsty Gorter. This personal political approach has been a backbone for feminist art but it is by no means the only approach.
The ways in which the Women’s Art Register creates its history in this exhibition is worth noting because the feminist methodology is apparent in the curatorial practice and its propositions. On the tables installed in the Landmarks exhibition a history of organisations unfolds through works and their traces. The first table showcases workshops, ideas, games, and pedagogical ephemera from Women’s Art Register and the second table presents Sandra Bridie’s printed cards that detail the feminist events, festivals and exhibitions at the George Paton Gallery since 1974. [1]
The tables are a kind of hub in my mind as they entwine two histories and bring them together. As noted by other speakers this gallery has a deep history of supporting radical art and it was here that Lip magazine and the initial ideas about the Women’s Art Register were hatched.
The exhibition demonstrates how the trace and the document are in and around art. In the postgraduate works of Brianna Simonsen, Lisa Bellear the acclaimed first nations activist, photographer and broadcaster is celebrated as part of a series of portrait-collage posters that commemorate activist history.
Landmarks is curated by Merren Ricketson and Kirsty Gorter both of whom contribute work. Ricketson’s Education kit for ‘Flesh after Fifty’ is one of many pedagogical projects she has created and the commemorative poster by Kate Sfetkidis manages to include many traces of projects presented by the Women’s Art Register – the Aboriginal Art Kit, the Dinner Party event, the Monthly Cycle Game, the Women’s Gallery and more.
The Register’s history is in itself a rich and glorious contribution to feminism. It houses and protects a magnificent history and a living archive of Australian art representing 5000 artists. It is a great pleasure to officially launch the Women’s Art Register’s 50 th anniversary and to invite you to participate in the planned programs throughout 2025.
[1]: Bridie was the director of the George Paton Gallery from 2004-2024. The cards were included in an exhibition titled When you think about feminism what do you think? 2022 which Bridie curated with Emma Shaw. The title is a riff off Helen Vivian’s book When you think about art: The Ewing and George Paton Galleries 1971-2008, Melbourne: Macmillan, 2008.
