Homage to 20 awesome women at Greenham
‘20 Historical Women who Changed the World’: paintings by Chinwe Russell at The Base at Greenham. Review by LIN WILKINSON
There is much to enjoy in Chinwe Russell’s show: bold, vibrantly coloured work that celebrates inspirational women who have made huge contributions to the world.
Russell’s big canvases are painted in a consciously ‘naive’ style, featuring flat colour-fields and black outlines, the approach perhaps stemming from West African vernacular representation and the brilliant colours of its textiles. In each work, a central, almost life-size figure dominates the frame. On a brightly coloured ground, with no shading or perspective, each gazes straight at the viewer.
Russell works fast, physically and instinctively, using commercial paint brushes as well as conventional artists’ brushes. She works in acrylic, a medium ideally suited to such direct work.
The paintings are figurative but are not close likenesses of their subjects. The stylised work is essentially descriptive, more concerned with who the women were and what they achieved. Immediately accessible, with strong political overtones, they contain contextual elements - objects and text - relevant to each woman.
Some subjects are etched in our DNA (Elizabeth I, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Coco Chanel). Others will be familiar to many, but perhaps new to younger visitors to the show.
Mary Slessor, a working-class Scots missionary to Nigeria, adopted many twins who would otherwise have died: they were considered a bad omen and abandoned. Maria Montessori’s early-years educational approach, beloved by the middle classes, continues to be influential.
Marie Stopes was an inspiration to the first wave of British feminists: her family planning clinics were centrally important to women gaining control over their lives. More recently, the celebrated Iraqi-born British architect, Zaha Hadid, was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for architecture, with her radical curvilinear buildings.
British scientist Rosalind Franklin worked on DNA and the structure of polio; Czech doctor Gerty Cori was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology. In the early nineteenth century, Ada Lovelace’s collaborative mathematical and scientific work inspired the development of modern computers.
In 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, became the world’s first female prime minster. Barbara Castle, Labour’s firebrand and a front-line Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s, left an impressive legacy ̶ compulsory car seat-belts, the 70mph top speed limit and measures to combat drink-driving ̶ and was a major player in the Equal Pay Act and the Child Benefit Act.
Unfamiliar names deserving of recognition include Nwanyeruwa, who campaigned for women’s rights in Nigeria from the 1929 ‘Women’s War’ onwards. Marie Maynard Daly was the first African-American woman to gain a Ph.D in chemistry, later working on the cardiac and circulatory systems. Wangari Maathai, who supported women’s environmental work in Kenya, was the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Stephanie Kwolek, a Polish-American chemist, invented Kevlar.
The image of Golda Meir, who helped found the state of Israel and was its first female prime minister, is perhaps the most troubling. She is pictured pregnant with the Jewish flag, protected by four machine guns.
For my generation Rosa Parks’ bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, in the mid-1950s was a seminal moment in our political education, but (with tongue firmly in cheek), to my mind Josephine Cochrane, inventor of the dishwasher, comes a close second.
The exhibition runs until Sunday, November 19 (Wed-Sun 10-5; last entry 4pm).
Tickets £6.75 (plus concessions); visit www.thebasegreenham.co.uk or phone the box office on (01635) 522733.
