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In a dimly lit domestic interior, a black figure—the artist—stands behind a table adorned with white-and-blue Chinese pottery, flowers, a cake, and a plate of fruits, all in the same shade of cobalt blue. She gazes directly into the camera as she pours a blue liquid from a carafe into a cup. The scene is from the photograph A Hint of Blue II (2021) by Zimbabwean-Scottish visual artist Sekai Machache (b.1989), part of a wider series that restages traditional still-life motifs to highlight the imperialist history and ideology underpinning the genre [Fig. 1].  

A Hint of Blue II was acquired by The Women’s Art Collection (WAC) in 2023. This essay examines �Ѳ����󲹳����’s work alongside New Atlantis (2004) by Gayle Kwong Chan (b.1973) in order to explore how works within The WAC challenge western art histories. I argue that this is achieved through a process of demythification, a term I borrow from feminist art historian Griselda Pollock to describe how power structures—including those that have historically underpinned artistic production and reception—are exposed. By focusing on these case studies, this essay seeks to answer the question of what difference—if any—a women’s art collection can make to established artistic and institutional traditions. I begin by considering how the case studies respectively illuminate and subvert the ideological foundations of still life and Romantic painting, and conclude by reflecting on the significance of the Collection’s space in resisting canonicity. 

Still life became popular during the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, a period of economic prosperity driven by the country’s colonial expansion. Interpretations of the genre typically focus on deciphering symbolic meaning; for instance, reading vanitas imagery as a memento of the transience of life. However, more recent critiques adopt a social-historical approach to emphasise still life’s entanglement with the rise of consumer society and the urban merchant class during the second wave of European colonialism. �Ѳ����󲹳����’s restaging of still life through photography disrupts the symbolic sheen of the painted surface to favour the immediate depiction of commodities in a domestic setting. In doing so, she draws attention to the material histories and role of objects in the production of cultural identity and class status.  

�Ѳ����󲹳����’s A Hint of Blue can be seen as participating in the demythification of the representational codes that structure western art histories, including its imperialist and patriarchal value systems that contribute to the formation of an art canon. In her 1999 study Differencing the Canon, Pollock reflected on how the practice of women artists might challenge the hierarchies upholding the discipline of art history. The study developed her previous co-authored work with Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), which argued that the canon of art and its hierarchies were predicated on the creation and devaluation of the “feminine stereotype”, denoting those subjects and media that were conventionally associated with femininity, such as domestic scenes and embroidery. In her later publication, Pollock explored what an effective mode of differencing might entail that would not reproduce a dualistic pitting of (masculine) norm and (feminine) otherness. Inspired by Adrienne Rich’s notion of “re-vision” – described as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” – Pollock proposed a mode of differencing that would make legible the power structures that have historically shaped artistic production and reception.

Chinese blue-and-white porcelain is a frequent motif in still life and genre paintings. The blue hue of �Ѳ����󲹳����’s photograph highlights this type of porcelain, drawing attention to its historical function to signal wealth and luxury. For instance, Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar (1669) by Willem Kalf (1619-93) and Interior with a Dordrecht Family (1656) by Nicolaes Maes (1634-93) reduce objects to symbols that serve a western fantasy of exoticism. In contrast, �Ѳ����󲹳����’s realistic rendering and hyperbolic re-staging of the objects emphasise their material history steeped in colonial trade, consumerism, and practices of Orientalism. The artist’s confrontational gaze from the compositional centre prompts active engagement from the viewer; specifically, to reflect upon uncritical involvement in a representational tradition that has participated in the objectification and orientalisation of non-western cultures and people. The artist’s presence alludes to the trope of the black servant in still lifes, such as Still Life with a Black Servant (ca. 1670/80) by Juriaen van Streeck (1632-87) where the black figure is marginalised and reduced to the status of a commodity. �Ѳ����󲹳����’s direct gaze activates the conventionally inert scene, inscribing a different mode of agency for the black subject and altering the viewer’s relation to the image. By looking back, the artist harnesses the power of the oppositional gaze described by bell hooks, a critical and interrogative mode of viewing that exposes and challenges the objectifying representational mechanisms complicit in racial and gender domination.

Some feminist art historians analyse the work of women artists in order to uncover the artistic methods used for subverting traditional practices. However, this approach has been criticised for reinforcing essentialist notions of gender difference, marginalising the contribution of women artists, and offering a reductive interpretation of work as inherently revolutionary. Pollock and her contemporaries foresaw and warned of the canonisation of women artists and feminism. Amid current criticisms about the commodification and tokenistic incorporation of “diversity” in cultural institutions – an approach that often leaves the underlying exclusionary structures unchanged – we must be wary of the uncritical deployment of the “woman artist” brand.  

The question arises of whether work by women artists is merely destined to be integrated into a preexisting discourse, or if it can “develop forms that radically resist and provoke the hegemonic”. Tradition is central to the appeal of canonicity, which relies on the creation and naturalisation, through repetition, of a selective mythical past that serves to validate the values of a dominant class. Crucially, as Pollock put it, tradition “cultivates its own inevitability by erasing the fact of its selectivity in regard to practices, meanings, gender, ‘races’ and classes”, thereby presenting its values as natural and universally appealing.11 Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Pollock emphasised that canonicity does not simply work through imposition but through the internalisation of the mythic structure of the canon—its hierarchies of values and celebration of connoisseurship and greatness—that threaten to reproduce exclusions even when previously marginalised subjects are positioned as cultural producers.  

Therefore, critical intervention in the hierarchies of art history demands a commitment to demythification. “Cockaigne” (2004) by Gayle Chong Kwan exemplifies how this process may operate. The photographic series revisits mythical landscapes, including fourteenth-century ideas of the glutton’s paradise, Francis Bacon’s utopian island of Bensalem (described in New Atlantis (1626)), and the biblical tower of Babel. Mythical and utopian discourses have historically been privileged sites for shaping collective imaginaries, either to naturalise or subvert dominant socio-cultural values. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz posited that utopian worldlings, while often reproducing the values of a dominant class, also have the potential to conjure alternative realities to an oppressive social order. In New Atlantis, Kwan references Bacon’s Enlightenment utopia of an ideal island whose inhabitants are committed to the advancement of scientific knowledge and where Christian family values prevail. Compositionally, the photograph recalls The Sea of Ice (ca. 1823–1824) by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), an oil painting which portrays a shipwreck amid a dramatic landscape of jagged ice floes and shards. The Sea of Ice has come to emblemise the Romantic ideal of the Sublime, described by Schiller to entail a reckoning with the vulnerability of humanity to the physical force of nature. In New Atlantis, Kwan references but downplays Friedrich’s dramatic composition by restaging the scene with perishable foodstuffs. The incorporation of fish, dried meats, oats, and vegetables recasts utopian iconographic and narrative motifs as represented in the Western humanist tradition, and thereby muddy the separation between “high” and “low” culture, or the cultural and domestic.  

Displayed throughout the corridors, dining hall, and library of �Ǹ�Թ�, the works of Machache and Kwan challenge the iconographic and genre traditions of the Western art canon. Moreover, the placement of these works in the educational and intimate collegiate environment also contribute to a feminist reframing of the art collection’s role in its capacity to resist the operations of mythification and commodification typical of conventional museum displays. Here, the collection is no longer understood as the repository of a hegemonic or exemplary cultural narrative, but as a critical and dynamic tool to provoke reflection about the structures of gender oppression. The focus on women – as highlighted by the Collection’s name – understates the broader implications of its mission. Rather than establishing a new pantheon of artists, The WAC testifies to the generative power of feminist artistic and curatorial practices to open new possibilities for how we encounter and interpret art.  

Images

Fig. 1: Sekai Machache, A Hint of Blue 2 (2021). Digital photographic print on  

aluminium with tray frame, 84.1 x 118.8 cm. The Women’s Art Collection, Cambridge. 

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