WoollattCarruthers

Why menopause?

Menopause is a stage in our lives that goes without ceremony. It is a communal moral outrage of the way women are treated by society, particularly at this important stage of our lives, that has led us to take action. This outrage motivates us to change the narrative and make us active again in our own stories.

Menopause comes as a shock to many of us. Often being misdiagnosed my medical professionals not trained to recognise the symptoms and advising women badly. Leaving some women lost and afraid of what they are experiencing, leading to increased presentations of depression and anxiety. For others it is a time of great release from the confines of the fertile woman that has defined them. This freedom enables new creative energies and new voices to be heard. For all though, it is a time of loss and undoing. And with loss comes grief. Rituals are a way of helping us through our grief.

The work Jane and I are making asks:

How can we create a ritual for menopause? One that can both help us and one that celebrates and promotes new visuals, language and understandings of it?

We ask this as we found the images and words used in relation to menopause, mostly spread a sense of fear to those yet to experience it. It is often seen through the male medical gaze and signified through a lack or a loss.

As an artist I’m interested in transitional moments in women’s lives and how we navigate them, through ritual. Considering our experience of them from the inside rather than the outside. Taking a non clinical approach so as to give time and significance to experience. I am often fighting against a perceived wisdom and interested in breaking a taboo. It might be seen as pushing against something. Raising significance to subjects that go unheard, un-understood, seen as unnecessary. Throughout my art practice I have worked around themes of womanhood and in particular the connection between the ancient and contemporary woman through our connection with the earth. (Jane and I have been doing this separately for many years and now are coming together with this work)

Why Two Tree Island

We to imagine ourselves as two women acting as guardians who live on Two Tree Island. We think of the island as a woman. The site specific nature of the work has taken the project into concerns beyond our immediate bodies, looking at environmental issues such as climate change. Here we make parallels between the island how she is mis treated, unloved, forgotten and the similar treatment of the menopausal woman.

Site specific work has always interested me responding to the environment and listening to the earth and what it speaks to us and echo of our former selves is in there somewhere, our ancestors speaking back to us. It is through the earth and the specific place that we can see our forms duplicated the tide coming and going like the rhythm of our own cycles leaving behind mud banks moist and wet one minute, dry and craggy the next, they seemed poetically linked to our bodily experience.

The island also has personal echoes for me to my grandmother in Scotland living as a fisher woman by the sea, gutting fish all her life hands wrapped in bandages, head covered in a scarf, long thick layered skirt protecting from the cold with big hob nail boots on and leather aprons. All bringing back memories of the tough life of women.

Why Collaborate?

As life long friends our companionship allows us to creativity collaborate using intuition and spontaneity and gives confidence and authority to ideas, that might at first seem insignificant. Through our process of listening, imagining and creating we continually co-write our internal narratives and learn from each other. It is one thing to experience something and another to share it; the voice; the language used; the visuals imagined, are all important, and as we test these out we find new words, shapes, and rituals to help form our understanding of menopause.

Why art?

Art is a way of interpreting the world for others to experience it from a different perspective. Through making we connect with different parts of our minds and bodily experiences. We create new memories with each other creating together.

Process. The whole experience of making and menopause is about process. We meet, we talk, we listen, we make, we review, we create, we plan. The repeated pattern adds layers of history to the work we make.

Art gives us a way of exploring unchartered territory without the restrictions of science or clinical understanding, we can work through our personal bodily experience. Working with hands is a kind of therapy without it being so defined, we work through ideas and thinking knowledge through making.