Dr Ella S Mills on ‘Anchorhold’
‘(Griselda) Pollock argues that the virtual feminist museum opens a different kind of time; not a timeline but a field of encounter. To be with ‘Anchorhold’ is to feel that field. What holds this together is not influence but resonance. These women have not passed something forward, one to the next; rather, we see a net, not a genealogy. Each node in tension with every other, across time and distance.’
Thank you to Dr Ella S Mills for her wonderful expanded reading of the context for the exhibition Anchorhold – Rachael Coward & Melanie Stidolph, at ALMA artspace, Newquay. This exhibition marks the beginning of an engagement with St Buriana of Cornwall and interpretations of her life as an Anchoress.
‘Julian of Norwich wrote from enclosure and became a point of contact for an entire community. The world reached her through her squint, in fragments, and she received it with extraordinary care. Stidolph and Coward are not enclosed in the same way; they are working, mobile and collaborative, making work in and from the world. But there is something anchoritic in the quality of attention this exhibition asks of us.’
Dr Ella S. Mills is an art historian, curator and artist mentor based in Devon, and together with Vashti Cassinelli founded Cassinelli Mills – ‘holistically supporting the legacies of artist-women and non-binary artists past, present and future’.
The full text is now live on the Art Cornwall website – thank you for the feature.