The Great Women Artists

Dame Tracey Emin is BACK on The GWA Podcast!

Hailed for her paintings, videos, textiles, neons, writing, sculptures, installations, and now, her extraordinary work as an educator, raising the next generation of artists at TKE Studios in Margate, right by where we are recording today – Emin has been at the forefront of art for more than four decades. Born in Croydon, and raised in Margate with her twin brother Paul, Emin had a complex child- and teenagehood, which she details in her part-memoir, Strangeland – as well as in works such as Why I Never Became a Dancer or Mad Tracey From Margate. Officially leaving school aged 15, Emin went to Maidstone College of Art, and onto the Royal College – where she won over her interviewees with her impressive sketch book selection.

In 1993, she kept a shop in Brick Lane, titled “The Shop”, which ended with a party on her 30th birthday, and that year had her first exhibition – at a then-new gallery called White Cube. On view were objects she had collected over the years – from teenage diaries to toys, paintings, drawings and unsent letters. She titled it My Major Retrospective, just in case she never had another show. However, this was just the start.

Emin has since exhibited all over the world – most recently the Yale Center for British Art, where I saw her work a floor above JMW Turner, getting me to realise the painterly relationship between the two artists – despite working 250 years apart – from how Emin plays with moods akin to his stormy weathers, to how the bodies in her paintings evoke his mountainous landscapes, with vein-like rivers. As well as Palazzo Strozzi, highlighting Emin's relationship to the history and iconography in Italian art – such as life, death and the crucifixion, to the decay of the body and enlightenment through spiritual (and sexual) quests. It challenged the city’s history, revealing the rawness of a woman's perspective in a culture that so rarely addressed it.

Now, we meet in Margate on the occasion of the largest – and perhaps the most important – exhibition in her life so far, “A Second Life” opening at Tate Modern on 27 February, in the very city where her artistic life thrived. But it’s also a show taking place after monumental personal shifts, such as her mother’s passing in 2016, surviving cancer in 2020, the opening of her free studio-based art school in 2023, but also when the world couldn’t be more excited for Emin. She has said of this show to be a “true celebration of living” and I can’t wait to find out more…

I am very excited to announce that I have written a new book, The Story of Art without Men: An illustrated guide to amazing women artists (out on 5 March!).

It’s an adaptation of The Story of Art without Men for readers aged 8–14 (and above), brought to life with beautiful illustrations by Ping Zhu and artworks from the past 500 years.

From the Renaissance to the present day, via Cornwall, Japan, Paris and New York City, this book features a whole host of artistic trailblazers, freedom fighters, and game changers.

We look at Surrealism – a movement born out of the horrors of the First World War in Paris, where artists turned to their imaginations and away from the broken world around them for inspiration…

LISTEN TO A TEASER HERE... as I take my reader through the magical worlds of Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Lee Miller, and more.

Pre-order now:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-story-of-art-without-men/katy-hessel/9780241738191

Signed copy:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-story-of-art-without-men/katy-hessel/9780241824214

Personalised copy:

https://www.pickledpepperbooks.co.uk/products/the-story-of-art-without-men-an-illustrated-guide-to-amazing-women-artists-personally-signed-pre-order-5th-march

Audible version:

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Story-of-Art-without-Men-Audiobook/B0FL842C9G?ref_pageloadid=not_applicable&pf_rd_p=af5062e9-57de-425c-9e02-6d8ad006b9aa&pf_rd_r=MPG0TFFB1QZHFK2NBZ63&plink=loLGYMj2VPTh5M0d&pageLoadId=eNJzHRjC9m8z0lhu&creativeId=83220593-1d50-4883-bad4-b5d505543719&ref=a_author_Ka_c9_lProduct_1_3

Dear listeners,

As we enter a new month of December, I wanted to share a teaser of the audiobook of my new book, How to Live an Artful Life.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-live-an-artful-life/katy-hessel/9781529155204

Here is an extract from the month of December, featuring its introduction and the first five days.

Each month is based around a theme. For example, January is about seeking out ideas, February is about love, and September focuses on time. December's is joy and features thoughts, reflections, creative exercises and daily routines from the likes of Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Yoko Ono, Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, and more.

A time of celebration, light and beauty; a time to spend with family and take part in festivities; to relish in the delights that the gift of art can give, and to take stock in everything you’ve discovered, learnt, tried and tasted this year.

As we embark on this month, before we start again in January, think of December – like art – as a gift that has been given to you, full of work yet to be written, painted, sculpted and more; people whom you have yet to meet, talk to or fall in love with.

I am so excited to bring you this conversation with the extraordinary Es Devlin, who joined me at Liberty last week to celebrate the release of How to Live an Artful Life.

Es Devlin is an artist and stage designer renowned all over the world for her large-scale performative sculptures and environments – from theatre and opera design for the National Gallery and Royal Opera House, to kinetic stage sculptures for musicians like Beyoncé, U2 and Lady Gaga. She has also created luminous installations at the V&A, Serpentine Galleries, Somerset House, and more. Whether designing for Beyoncé, the opera, or creating public artworks, Es Devlin’s works dissolve the boundaries between art, architecture and performance, and encourage us to rethink our position in the world.

Expertly led by the wonderful Hannah Macinnes, we touched on all things to do with living an artful life – Es’s morning routine; how we can get better at focusing our attention on one thing; artmaking as an expression of love; the artist hustle – and so much more. I can’t wait for you to hear it.

Pick up your copy of How to Live an Artful Life: https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-live-an-artful-life/katy-hessel/9781529155204

An Atlas of Es Devlin https://www.waterstones.com/book/an-atlas-of-es-devlin/es-devlin/andrea-lipps/9780500023181

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed curator, author, and expert in photography, Madga Keany.

Currently the Head Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Magda was most recently Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and before that, Senior Curator, Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery London, where she lead the realisation of a major re-presentation of the Photographs Collection as part of the museum’s rehaul.

Keany has curated shows and published texts on Australian art, design and social history, photography that ranges from the Victorian period to fashion, conflict and portraiture, solo presentations of portraits by Irving Penn, among many others. She has written for the groundbreaking Know My Name project, that put women artists in Australia on a global stage as well as for Cindy Sherman, A World History of Women Photographers, and more.

…but it was her exhibition last year that really grabbed my attention: Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream in', that brought together the two photographers working 100 years apart, from very different worlds, circumstances and contexts, but which showed how these pioneering women shaped the medium, with their dreamlike pictures imbued with beauty, symbolism, classicism, transformation and more…

So today, I couldn’t be more excited to delve into the life of the 19th century photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who, aged 49 in 1863, picked up a camera and, largely self-taught, crafted her distinct bohemian style pictures with that hazy sepia glow, that proved to not only be influential in Victorian Britain, but have a huge impact on photography at large. As Cameron once said:

“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”

And I can’t wait to find out more.

People mentioned:

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
Francesca Woodman (1958–1981)
John Herschel (1792–1871)

Artworks:

Julia Margaret Cameron, Annie, 1864; https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O81145/annie-photograph-cameron-julia-margaret/

Julia Margaret Cameron, Pomona, 1872; https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1433678/pomona-photograph-cameron-julia-margaret/

Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Carlyle, 1867; https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/269434

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Astronomer, 1867; https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1433637/the-astronomer-photograph-cameron-julia-margaret/

Julia Margaret Cameron, Ellen Terry, at the age of sixteen, 1864 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/269433

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield