Little Savage Sketchbook: A Revolution: Part II

For the show 'Nothing Personal' in November 2011, I became obsessed with these women - Manon Roland, Olympe de Gouge, Anne Theroigne de Mericourt, Pauline Leon and Claire Lacombe. All five of them had played an important role in the French Revolution, either within the political establishment or on the streets as part of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (S.R.R.W). I began making this work only a few months after Cairo's Tahrir Square protests and the toppling of the Mubarak government. At the time there was a great deal of anecdotal evidence that the role women had played in the square was immediately squashed once the regime fell. 'You can go home now' is apparently what many were told.

This is exactly was happened to the women of S.R.R.W. in Paris. Whipped up by the various revoltuionary factions to protest at the price of bread, laws preventing them from owning property and lack of education, the women of Paris took to the streets in often violent protest.

Model as Anne Theroigne de Mericourt

As soon as the Girondists took power from the royalists, they clamped down on the S.R.R.W. Under the Jacobins (Robespierre) the society was made illegal and the women who led it (Pauline and Claire being two) were as persecuted during The Terror as any aristocrat. Indeed the revolutionaries changed the very fabric of domesticity when they toppled the monarchy - cementing women's position 'in the home' and preventing them from accessing power within the public domain. It may seem like a long time ago, and not relevant to us but in fact we are still living with the repercussions today.

Laura as Claire Lacombe

This was on my mind as I made work for my show and the centrepiece was 4 portraits of contemporary women who, to me, embodied the personalities of those women from the Revolution.