| Aotearoa New Zealand
is a small country with 52 million sheep, around 4 million people
and many lesbians who love the land. Some lesbians make images
that relate to landscapes. Of these, some use clay as material.
Some paint, draw or photograph the landscape. Others make installations,
films
and videos on or about it.
"Lesbian" landscapes are rarely easy to identify. Lesbian
identity embraces much more than its sexual expression. And sexuality
in art works is often neither explicit nor named. While making
art can be an erotic process this may convey itself to a viewer
without showing any element that most people
would immediately name as sexual. As well, every lesbian's identity
has many dimensions and her lesbian dimension may have minimal
influence on her work as an artist.
As a result lesbians may not know who "our" artists
are. Our artists' images and our art history are often lost to
us. The artists represented here belong to a generation that searched
out - usually with difficulty, uncertainty and some error - our
lesbian foremothers, cultural grandmothers, aunties, cousins and
sisters, often during processes where we came to
identify as feminists as well as lesbians.
I collected these images partly to make it easier for curious
lesbians of the future. They complement an academic article called
"Lesbian landscapes: a little oral history". I wanted
to make connections between academic hard copy journal and electronic
publication and illustrate the advantages and
strengths of each, for the art students I was then teaching. A
shorter version of the article
was published in the New Zealand Women's Studies Journal 17:1
(2001).
These images are best understood in conjunction with the article.
But I have added some other text to most of them, a little "snapshot"
of each artist; and website links for those artists who have them.
One artist included in the article declined to be represented
on this site.
WORKS ARE COPYRIGHT THE RESPECTIVE ARTIST OR HER ESTATE
marian.evans@vuw.ac.nz
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