Art Review: Women Like You
Article published: Thursday, March 25th 2010
If Emmeline Pankhurst were alive today, I wonder if she would be able to believe that her portrait was hanging in Manchester Art Gallery. It was to our very own city art gallery that Emmeline and her fellow suffragettes went, to smash the glass covering the artworks (amusingly, and sensibly, with little toffee hammers so as to not damage the canvases themselves).
The suffragettes did so because they could simply not stomach that the men of Manchester were admiring beautiful artwork whilst beautiful, real women were starving themselves for the right to vote.
It seems remarkable that Women Like You, created by Manchester-based artist Charlotte Newson, is the first public artwork to commemorate Emmeline. It echoes the spirit of the suffragette movement, albeit through modern means. The portrait is a photo mosaic made up of 10,000 tiles, each its own portrait of members of the public’s chosen inspirational women. Over the course of a year, Charlotte collected these photos, sent in by men and women from all over the world, and then fed them into a computer program to create the image. The artwork, like Emmeline’s movement, has brought together individuals to make a stirring statement.
Unusually for a gallery piece, posters of the portrait have been placed on poster sites around the city centre and on the main roads into Manchester. Charlotte Newson, who has produced large amounts of work with outreach groups, wanted to get the attention of non-gallery goers in order to ‘celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary’. The real portrait, however, is still something to behold: the rich colours she has pieced together are exquisite. Photo mosaics are not new, but this one tells thousands of stories and celebrates Manchester’s most influential woman all at once.
Grace Cahill
Women Like You will be at Manchester Art Gallery until 9 May 2010
More: Culture, Exhibition, Manchester
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