Juliet Batten | |
---|---|
Born | 1942 Inglewood |
Nationality | New Zealand |
Alma mater | University of Auckland |
Known for | Art performances and writing focused of feminism and the environment. Writing on and practice of psychotherapy |
Notable work | 'The menstrual maze' (1983), '100 Women project (1985) |
Style | Ritual based community performances |
Movement | Feminist art |
Website | https://www.julietbatten.co.nz/ |
Juliet Batten (born 1942) played a role in the establishment of the feminist art movement in New Zealand with performance work involving ritual and community involvement. [1] She went on to become a psychotherapist and healer committed to community-driven ritualistic practices. [2]
Juliet Batten was born in Inglewood in 1942. After studying in Taranaki and Auckland she graduated in 1969 with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland. Batten then spent two years in Paris on a Doctoral Fellowship. [3] On her return to New Zealand she combined teaching art history at the University of Auckland with art-making and settled in Te Henga outside Auckland. [4]
Batten began her art career as a craft person who went on to paint, but by the early 1980s she was focused on performing and recording ritual based [5] works that foregrounded environmental and feminist issues. [6] Often in the form of nature-based rituals, Batten's work depended on the co-operation and collaboration of other women [7] She acknowledges that an impetus behind early versions of such collaborative work was her friendship with the feminist artist Allie Eagle who had moved to Te Henga in 1978. [8] Batten has spoken about how her friendship with Eagle ‘unlocked her art,’ and ‘crystallised her ideas.’ [9] Eagle in turn has also acknowledged Batten for her own shift to environmental issues. [10] Other artists who found Batten's focus on community influential included Carol Shepheard who participated in Batten's Lifescape environment. [11] In discussing Batten's work, art historian Cheryll Sotheran commented that Batten's use of the landscape to present spiritual values was ‘significant’ and that by using many different media including photography, sketches, oil pastels and watercolours she had created a ‘vocabulary of female spirituality and creativity’. [12] In 1980 Batten became a founding member of the Women's Gallery in Wellington along with a group of other women artists both based in Wellington and from around the country including Fiona Clark, Allie Eagle, Marion Evans, Claudia Pond Eyley, Keri Hume, Anna Keir, Bridie Lonie, Heather McPherson, Joanna Paul, Nancy Peterson, Helen Rockel, Carole Stewart and Tiffany Thornley. [13] The same year Batten facilitated the Ponsonby Women's Outreach, a gallery environment specifically for women. [14] In 1981 Batten received a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant to travel to the United States. She visited the Woman's Building in San Francisco where she was able to observe leading edge experimental lesbian and feminist art. [15]
Batten remained a feminist artist throughout the eighties and nineties known for her collaborative art projects for women and ritual performances. [3] In 1988 she published her book Power from Within [16] that summed up Batten's work as ‘an artist, teacher and ritual maker’ up to that time. [17]
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985.
1986
1987
1988
1990
1993
1995
The feminist art movement that Batten helped pioneer was not treated seriously by many critics. Batten asserted that feminist artists were still ‘under the power of narrow-minded, biased reviewing’ and that they should ‘work together to give all women visibility, including Māori and lesbian artists.’ She believed that only collective action could help grow the number of women working for change in the arts. [43] The movements strongest critic was Lita Barrie. She singled Batten out for her use of pastel colours, flower imagery and ‘vaginal forms’ for their too obvious reference to feminist concerns. [44] Art Historian Anne Kirker consistently labelled Batten as a teacher and facilitator rather than an artist. She argued that Batten's work sacrificed aesthetics for process and suggested that by collaborating with groups of women she ‘created less effective results in that it tended to disperse the communication’ and ‘prove less effective’. [15] Other early arguments against the feminist art movement claimed that, ‘Femininity is not involved any more than masculinity in the work of men painters. Art transcends sex." [45] Feminist critics like Cheryll Sotheran were more generous. Sotheran admired Batten's approach, ‘She emphasises the progressive, time-related nature of the experience, both in the making of the works and in their implied qualities’ [12]
Batten first had poems published in Landfall 126 and 129 in the 1970s and from the 1980s published a significant number of books many of them illustrated with her own work. [46] Batten has also written articles, papers and books both as a practising artist and later as a professional psychotherapist. Her publications on art include:
1981–1983
Batten presented ‘Emerging from Underground: The Women’s Art Movement in New Zealand’ as a Women's Studies Conference paper. This paper was published in Spiral Magazine the following year and in 1988 in book form as Power from Within: A Feminist Guide to Ritual-Making. [47]
1982 Women, water and sand: a personal account. [48]
Batten also spread her ideas on feminism and art through her writing in the feminist magazine Broadsheet . In 1983 [49] Batten's piece titled ‘What is a Feminist Artist?’ focussed on 35 women artists asking the question What is a feminist artist? [50] As art historian Katryn Baker has noted the 1980s, “were a decade marked by discussions that aimed to clarify the true meaning of feminism, its various connotations, and how to apply it to the art world in a way that would enable other women artists and the broader public to comprehend the feminist discourse without viewing it as “too” political or dangerous.” Batten took up the topic again in Broadsheet in 1986. [51]
1987The Edmonds Cookbook and the Ivory Tower. [52] The piece was a rebuttal to the essay Remissions: Toward a Deconstruction of Phallic Univocality written by art critic and theorist Lita Barrie in 1986. [44]
1989Art and Identity in Culture and Identity in New Zealand. [53]
1995Celebrating the Southern: Rituals for Aotearoa. [54]
1997Releasing the Artist Within: The Visual Diary. [55]
Alongside her work as a practicing artist Batten spent over 25 years as a psychotherapist. More recently she has participated in research around aging and the benefits of mindfulness and community. [61] She asserts that rituals around dying in Pākehā culture [62] need to be transformed into more personal rituals and that spiritual care is integral to compassionate care. [63]
Gordon Frederick Walters was a Wellington-born artist and graphic designer who is significant to New Zealand culture due to his representation of New Zealand in his Modern Abstract artworks.
Alexis Jan Atthill Hunter was a New Zealand painter and photographer, who used feminist theory in her work. She lived and worked in London UK, and Beaurainville France. Hunter was also a member of the Stuckism collective. Her archive and artistic legacy is now administered by the Alexis Hunter Trust.
Richard John Killeen is a significant New Zealand painter, sculptor and digital artist.
Jeffrey Harris is a New Zealand artist. Harris started his career in Christchurch, moving to Dunedin, New Zealand in 1969. In the early 1980s he worked briefly in the United States, before moving to Melbourne, Australia in 1986. In 2000 he returned to Dunedin, where he still lives. Largely self-taught, but mentored by notable New Zealand artists such as Michael Smither and Ralph Hotere, he has painted full-time since 1970.
Dame Cheryll Beatrice Sotheran was a New Zealand museum professional. She was the founding chief executive of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and was credited with the successful completion of the museum, considered the largest international museum project of the 1990s.
Jacqueline Mary Fahey is a New Zealand painter and writer.
Judith Eleanor Jane Cowan, generally known as Juliet Peter, was a New Zealand artist, potter, and printmaker. Her husband Roy Cowan was also a well-known New Zealand potter, printmaker and illustrator.
Vivian Isabella Lynn was a New Zealand artist.
Joanna Margaret Paul was a New Zealand visual artist, poet and film-maker.
Jenny Gwynndd Harper is a New Zealand academic and museum professional. She was most recently the director of Christchurch Art Gallery.
Allie Eagle was a New Zealand artist whose work in the 1970s was key to the development of feminist art practice in New Zealand. She was the subject of the 2004 documentary Allie Eagle and Me. She identified herself as "a lesbian separatist and radical feminist."
This is a timeline of the feminist art movement in New Zealand. It lists important figures, collectives, publications, exhibitions and moments that have contributed to discussion and development of the movement. For the indigenous Māori population, the emergence of the feminist art movement broadly coincided with the emergence of Māori Renaissance.
Carole Marie Shepheard is a New Zealand artist. She specialises in printmaking and her work is held in national and international collections including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Marilynn Lois Webb was a New Zealand artist, noted for her contributions to Māori art and her work as an educator. She was best known for her work in printmaking and pastels, and her works are held in art collections in New Zealand, the United States, and Norway. She lectured at the Dunedin School of Art, and was made an emeritus principal lecturer in 2004.
Christine Webster is a New Zealand visual artist and photographer.
Heather Avis McPherson was a feminist poet, publisher and editor who played a key role in supporting women artists and writers in New Zealand. In 1976, she founded the Spiral Collective group and Spiral, a women's arts and literary journal that later published monographs. Her poetry book A Figurehead: A Face (1982) was the first book of poetry published in New Zealand by an openly lesbian woman. She published three further collections during her lifetime, and an additional two collections were published posthumously by fellow Spiral members.
The Women's Gallery was a collectively established and run art gallery in Wellington, New Zealand, showing only the work of women, that ran for four years between 1980 and 1984.
Spiral, also known as Spiral Collective or Spiral Collectives, is a New Zealand publisher and group of artist collectives established in 1975 with a focus on female artists and voices. Members of Spiral have published and created a number of projects and works including, notably, the Spiral journal, A Figurehead: A Face (1982) by Heather McPherson, The House of the Talking Cat (1983) by J.C. Sturm, the bone people (1984) by Keri Hulme, numerous art exhibitions and documentary films.
Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art was an exhibition of New Zealand art organised in partnership by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney and the National Art Gallery, Wellington, in 1992
Bridie Lonie is a New Zealand academic, arts educator, arts writer and artist. She lectured in art history and art theory at the Dunedin School of Art, served as head of the school over several periods between 2001 and 2021, and is now an emeritus member of the school. Her art has a particular focus on climate change and environmental issues.