Etchings from the Attic

Drawing on autobiographical memories of the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement, this article discusses feminist etchings made for my final undergraduate show. Etching, historically related to satire, was deliberately chosen to mock the disparaging treatment of the female artist. The article offers both an experiential and a contextual discussion of the atmosphere of social activism, political activity and consciousness-raising of the WLM as well as the journalism and feminist art history scholarship which informed my practice. Further, the article evaluates the potential naivety of my feminist strategy of ‘body art', as it risked being misunderstood as conventional sexually explicit imagery of female sexuality

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Feminism · Human sexuality · Journalism · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Psychology