It's nice to have some positive news to share with you at this time. I hope that you are all okay and that family and friends are safe.
I received an email just this week from the Landscape Institute, whose publication, Landscape, have run a story on my mural in Hotwells. Their interest was piqued by the location of the mural on the Cumberland Basin and the involvement of Dame Sylvia Crowe. She was a landscape Architect, who designed the piazza scheme and it's planting and is also responsible for the grassland area to the South of the river. Featuring a photograph of the Women of Hotwells and Cliftonwood, the Landscape institute have run a feature celebrating some of the Women who have passed through this small corner of Hotwells, Bristol, and sharing the story behind the mural.
I painted the Women of Hotwells and Cliftonwood mural in the summer of 2018. It’s inauguration coincided with the centenary of (some) women receiving the vote. I was approached to explore the concept by Anna Haydock-Wilson. The idea was motivated by Jane Duffus’s Women Who Built Bristol and was funded by H&CCA and Art Within the Cracks. The mural celebrates local women and those who passed through Hotwells and Cliftonwood, contributing to our community.
Inspired by nesting dolls, the forms were simplified and arranged in historical order on the side of the ramp leading into Hotwells – the women grow slowly as they move into more recent past. There is Dinah Black – one of the first recorded black people in England, who escaped shoeless from a ship bound from the West Indies to become a freed slave; Mary Wollstonecraft – Writer of the first feminist manifesto and mother of Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein used to live locally. Ellen Craft disguised herself as a white man, escaping to Bristol from America with her slave husband masquerading as her servant; Eliza Walker Dunbar, the first female surgeon in Bristol and founder of Read Dispensary for Women and Children, Hotwells; Angela Carter, who started a jazz night at the Bear on Hotwell Road and landscape Architect, Sylvia Crowe, who designed the Cumberland Piazza, where this mural is located.
The publication can be found online in it's entirety here.
Should you wish to find out more information about the Women who had an impact on this city, do read The Women who Built Bristol, by Jane Duffus. There is also a sequel, which references me and this mural. Not only are book 1 and 2 a great read, but if you buy direct, funds raised from the sale of the book go toward Bristol Womens Voice, a charity that promotes and publices capaigns that support and advance the equality of women.