Time to be part of a walking work of art
For a special day of marches in honour of the suffragettes, attendees have been invited to reinvent the banner, reports Kaite Welsh
In a small workshop in north Edinburgh, a group of women are gathered around a square of fabric in heated debate. Silver lettering calling women to “Pursue Equality Now” is being ironed on to a tartan background; the question is, does it need an exclamation point? “Are we demanding, or asking gently?” one muses.
If it weren’t for the electric iron and the very 21st-century clothes, this could be a scene from the 2015 film Suffragette – or BBC sitcom Up the Women. In fact, it is preparation for Processions, a nationwide celebration of 100 years of women’s voting rights that will take the form of a mass artwork march on June 10 in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London – marking this historic anniversary with a “living portrait” of women in the 21st century.
Inspired by historical processions, such as that of June 1911, which saw some 60,000 banner-carrying women walking from Westminster to the Albert Hall, organisers anticipate a considerably higher number marching in their honour – a stunning river of green, white and violet winding through the streets of the UK’S four capital cities. With 100 professional pieces of artwork commissioned and tens of thousands of homemade banners being sewn as we speak, it may be one of the largest and most creative displays of women’s history ever seen.
Back in Edinburgh, this disparate group of older women are all bubbling over with enthusiasm, both for this celebration of feminist history and for the way that younger generations have embraced both the anniversary and women’s rights itself.
“We still don’t have equality if you look around the world,” says one, shaking her spiky purple-haired head, and I cannot help noticing that all the participants defy the kind of sexist, ageist stereotypes thrown at women in different ways. Some, like ceramicist Eve, are artists themselves, others are just along for the feminist revolution. A former club owner cheekily regales us with stories of an affair with a famous comedian in the Eighties, someone else about her recent adventure mountaineering in India.
At the centre is Clare Hunter, a textile artist who has been reclaiming traditional women’s crafts as a means of protest for over 30 years. It began during the miner’s strike, when Hunter made banners to take on the picket line. “I thought it was such a wonderful medium – you could have a central strong image, there was text and it was public. I was interested in getting women more involved with public life creatively and so I decided to come back to Scotland and set up a social enterprise based on banner and textile making on a larger scale.” She went on to create a banner for Glasgow’s 1990 tenure as City of Culture called Keeping Glasgow in Stitches, with an impressive dozenstrong series of 15ft banners made by 1,600 people from around the city. Her company, Needleworks, took the craft to everywhere from day care centres to museums and art galleries, bringing different groups together to create big textile pieces “that spoke about their lives, spoke about their concerns and aspirations and history”.
For Hunter, this project is as much about returning to the suffrage movement’s roots as it is to bringing a modern perspective to history. “When the suffragettes took to the streets, because they were being accused of being desexed and masculine, they decided that would make the most beautiful, feminine banners that they could. They purposefully made them from fabrics from the drawing room – from velvet and silks and satins – and to embroider them, fringe them, have tassels decorate them, so that nobody could deny that they weren’t feminine.
“They were just women who wanted to protest, who wanted their rights.”
Artichoke, the production team behind Processions, were such fans of Hunter’s work that they went to great lengths to track her down to get her involved. “I live in a tiny wee place and they literally sent one of the team to the glen to try and find me last summer,” she says, mystified.
But watching her galvanise the small team of volunteers to produce something eye-catching and clear shows why. “The banners are about getting a strong message over very simply, because onlookers only have a few seconds to get the message.”
There’s an iconic look to many vintage suffragette banners, which is thanks to artist Mary Lowndes, who made some of the most famous posters and banners. She set up The Artists’ Suffrage League to create artwork for suffrage events and wrote a pamphlet, Banner and Banner-making, encouraging others to do the same.
Lowndes inspired Hunter to create her own toolkit, which is available on the Processions website, offering a step-by-step approach to designing pennants or banners to carry in the procession. The Edinburgh project has been an intergenerational one, and on a table next to the banner lies a pile of paper sashes made by local teenage girls celebrating their own heroines – women such as Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama and Beyoncé. “The young women we’ve worked with know about the suffragette movement, but not the individual women or the work that took place in Scotland,” explains Anne Munro, who runs the Pilmeny Development Project, which works closely with young people in Edinburgh’s trendy but only slowly gentrifying Leith area. Some will march with the group in June, others are too overwhelmed with exams and the pressures of adolescence to get further involved, but its clear they relished the chance of break from school – and boys.
At a time when Scotland’s only state-funded girls’ school is facing pressure to go co-ed, the all-female space is clearly a much-needed one.
It’s one thousands of women will find on the march, which Hunter describes as “a moving portrait going through the streets in a ribbon of suffragette colours”, within which will be the banners that groups and individuals have been making.
Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership are creating a banner inspired by their local suffragette hero, Charlotte Despard, a founding member of the Women’s Freedom League. And Horsecross Arts in Perth are creating a banner near Perth Prison, which gained notoriety as the only Scottish prison with the facilities to forcefeed hunger-striking suffragettes.
With an online guide to designing artwork for the march and how to get local MPS and councillors involved, Hunter and Artichoke hope to spread the message across the UK and invite every woman and girl in the country to join them a week on Sunday – with or without a banner of their own.
For details on how to take part in Processions events on June 10, and to download a banner-making toolkit, go to processions.co.uk
‘We still don’t have equality if you look around the world’