Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow
Five stars
From Greenham Common to Palestine, Jenny Matthews has long been on the frontline of international protest against warfare. As a founder member in the 1980s of all-woman photographic agency, Format Photographers, and in everything that followed, Matthews’ images have brought to life the women caught in the crossfire of numerous conflicts and atrocities across more than forty years. Two decades on from her book, Women and War (2003), this solo show brings together several bodies of work that immortalise and honour her subjects using the most tender of means to keep them in the frame.
This is as clear in the series of twenty-three quilts lined with images from Matthews’ archive, as much as it is with the thirty-five portraits that use embroidery to mask the faces of Afghan women in Facial Derecognition (2021). It is there too in Torn Apart, an up to the minute series drawn from the crisis in Sudan, and a new series of images from Gaza.
In the former, Matthews taps into the radical comforts of quilting, with some of Matthews’ photographs of women in Chechnya, Ukraine, Guatemala, Nicaragua and other battlefields printed on materials sourced from each country. If taken down and thrown on to beds, those seeking shelter beneath these handcrafted creations would be able to share the warmth of those depicted as they nestled in close. As it is, having them hung on the gallery walls sees them become monumental banners finding common ground on some almighty crusade that both lays bare the wounds depicted while trying to heal.
Named simply after the country the photographs were taken, the forty portraits that make up Rwanda (1995) – that allegedly safe republic - are as powerful as the strip of five images of women in Bosnia (1992). That power comes from what amounts to an ever-expanding archive of living history. Drawing from DIY political montage and women’s sewing circles, Matthews transforms her already substantial body of work into something even richer, as her images are gathered together in a show of collective strength.
This is brought home in some of the images that accompany the quilts, with the colours added in changing an otherwise black and white world. The barbed wire the Greenham protestor is dragged through by soldiers now looks like the bloodied outline of a cartoon heart; the woman from Sierra Leone who holds onto her metal arm after having her real one chopped off by rebel soldiers framed by a string of flowers; the pregnant Nicaraguan woman similarly framed, and with an embroidered figure of her unborn baby made visible.
In a world where needles are used by men to maim, mutilate and murder, Matthews’ tapestries reclaim their creative and restorative function as weapons of happiness. This isn’t just about making and mending, but is a celebration of the life of every woman photographed.
The women posing in the Facial Derecognition (2021) series have been made anonymous due to their everyday identities being wiped, robbed or politicked out of existence. Garlanded here with floral bouquets or knitted masks, however, they have their dignity restored and memorialised by Matthews’ intervention. Matthews isn’t so much patching up the wounded, but, by subverting her own work with other forms, elevates them to a state of grace that makes them iconic. The descriptions of them on the labels beneath humanise them even more.
In Torn Apart, the heads of Sudanese women are split, their mirror images peppered with red thread patterned like bullet holes. In Palestine, a wounded woman swathed in bandages screams, red threads this time hanging from her eyes like a cocktail of blood and tears. The sense of disruption and scarred beauty in all of Matthews images go beyond photojournalism to bring home the horrors of what is depicted in them using everyday means.
As the double-edged sword of the exhibition’s title suggests, Matthews is knitting together a rich and necessary tapestry that links generations of women by way of an invisible thread. As the tapestry circumnavigates the globe in resistance, it finds strength in numbers in a fearless and unflinching provocation to create a real peace keeping force.
Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until 12 May.
The List, April 2024
ends
Comments