Tell Her Story

I started this blog because I wanted to focus my attention on women in art. I wanted to keep up to date with women in the art world. Luckily I have been a busy bee creating my own exhibition around women and art through the art collection of Darlington, North East England.  

This exhibtion came from me looking at how women are represented in collections around the North East of England. It was not great, many permanent collections had no women artist displayed. 

I had an opportunity to explore the Darlington collection in response to women artists. I found in the collection a lot of subject of women, who were not known and the artist unknown. This created Tell Her Story,  how many works of women have been lost though time. 

Tell Her Story is a new exhibition, curated by me! Which looks creatively at the images of unknown women in the Darlington Borough Art Collection and considers what they are saying to us now? Many art collections come together over decades or centuries and contain mysterious works. Sometimes little is known about the subject, artist, the work itself or how it entered the collection.

Darlington’s Art Collection has around 500 original works, including portraits of women now listed as ‘unknown’ and pictures with women who are not named. This exhibition includes paintings and a drawing from Darlington’s art collection, where information on the women involved was either absent, has been lost through time, or where images were drawn from the imagination in the first place. Tell her Story invited artists working today to consider such works and to generate new work in response, with both incorporated in this exhibition.

Artists working today involved in this project are Alyson Agar, Mircea Cirtog, Sarah Cooney, Tallulah Lines and Helen Winthorpe-Kendrick and Darlington's own Jonny Lancaster, Norma Kyle, James Quinn and poet, Helen Steel. This project has been supported through a Grants for the arts award from Arts Council England.


Preview Wednesday 23rd November, 5.30 till 7pm