Rose Garrard
Rose Garrard is a contemporary British artist, designer and teacher whose work spotlights lost and invisible histories of women artists. Garrard began her career studying sculpture at Stourbridge College of Art & Design (1965-66) and Birmingham College of Art (1966-69), before completing her postgraduate degree at Chelsea School of Art (1969-70). Gaining a British Council/French government scholarship to École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1970-71), Garrard extended her practice into installation, painting, performance, video, and audio art. Garrard’s work is highly experimental and her engagement with a variety of forms is part of a sustained interrogation of hierarchies of genre and questioning of assumed universal (read masculine) value systems by which artworks are judged. Her solo-exhibition Between Ourselves at Ikon Gallery in 1984 was an investigation of Dutch still life painting, a genre which women have historically turned to out of necessity. Garrard researched the works by women artists in the museum’s collection, including Berthe Morisot and Kate Bunce, using the Ikon exhibition space to recreate and reclaim these works from the perspective of a woman artist working in the 1980s. Garrard’s work is characterised by the relationship between object, space, performance, and viewer, and by the 1990s, the act of having conversations with members of the public became an integral part of her art practice. The archiving of women artists' work is another anchor of Garrard’s work, she has undertaken the task of compiling a catalogue of her own gallery work from 1969-1994, titled Archiving my Own History (1994).
