Our Time is Now, Now and Then

How a female artist’s art school notes are obscured by motherhood in the 1970s

‘Our Generation’ is the subtext of my work, women artists of the 1970s reclaiming our place in popular culture.

I am preparing another theme for Our Generation and I create scrapbooks of my adolescence and the culture of the 1970s. Having trawled through the chronology of family photographs I look at the work I made from the sixties to the seventies, poems stuffed into carrier bags and artwork lying in portfolios.

Inside art school note books and sketch pads, in the margins, I see doodles, scribbles, sketches, prose, essays, aspirations, chronicles, valedictory huff and puff, drawings of the ‘perfect’ eye, boys’ names, plans, rescues, defeats. I can see subliminal messages to the future, look what you were, became, are, and how you became you. The notes are written sitting next to a friend, a student, a tutor, in a class, in a kitchen, a bedroom, on the bus, in front of the television. Every mark a declaration and record of ‘our time is now. On the cover of one notebook I write twice ‘Dada is foolish. A public execution of false morality’. I scribble my name seven times.

The design project I concentrate on and struggle with are illustrations for a children’s book. The notebooks show how I’m desperately working out how I have boxed myself into a 20th century female trope – illustrating children’s books. I am not interested in this art form at all (my male tutors know this too but cannot break out of their own tropes).

The irony is not lost on me that the notebooks later became gendered children’s books in themselves, pages of shopping lists, Christmas present lists, illustrations of 20th century convention and tradition. Teaching my child to draw cats, dogs, hands and the nuclear family. Ambition now channelling recycled inspiration.

I’m looking at portraits of mothers holding children. Julia Stephens, Bernadine Coverly, Mabel Pryde, Jean Cook. When do we say our time is now? Then or only now and then. The notebooks of the 1970s tell me to look at what I was, became, are, and how I became me. How do I know when I have become and who tells me what I am. Have I been and gone? Was obscuring the 1973 to 1975 notes with my lists and doodles in my newly defined role as a mother leading me here or was I lost on the way?

New works for ‘Our Time is Now, Now and Then’ are on their way

‘Our Generation’ an exhibition of the works of Becky Nuttall and Laura Page at The Flavel Gallery Dartmouth Devon from 21st May – 1st June 2024