Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket is 50, and to celebrate 50 years of groundbreaking exhibitions, artist Holly Davey was invited to examine their archive. Davey’s process involves exploring the forgotten lives of women within the gallery space, taking apart history to find their stories underneath.
With The Unforgetting, she looks at every woman who has exhibited at Fruitmarket, bringing their names back to the fore and ‘re-seeing’ the stories that should remain part of our collective memory. 354 clay models represent the 354 women who have shown work at the gallery, and an audio clip says their names, with spaces left silent for their male counterparts.
The show calls to attention our knowledge of a space, beyond how we experience it in the present, and utilises the aesthetics of a ‘backstage’ archive to bring the hidden out into the open.
Is there anything in particular that surprised you about the Fruitmarket archive?
Whenever I approach an archive I try not to come with any expectations or assumptions. I didn’t expect to see the volume of photographic and slide work! They’ve got an incredible archive full of slides from 1975 onwards which aren’t digitised, so they’re not available online. To have the opportunity to look through those was just amazing.
Sometimes people would have leftover space on a roll and would use it up with random shots of the street or the office or the staff. It was those fragments and the in-between stuff that I really liked and wasn’t expecting to find. The throwaway shots really speak to the people who made the Fruitmarket archive.
Is that what you refer to as the ‘edges of the archive’?
What a lot of collections and archives often have is a particular narrative that tells you the story of their organisation. What I’m interested in are the other stories that exist within these spaces. Quite often, the stories that are sitting on those edges are the stories of women, of neurodiversity, of LGBTQ people, of disabled people, of people of colour.
It’s those narratives that I want to bring to the fore and to let them sit in a position of equity with the main story.
What has your experience as a female artist been like? What led you to want to go into archival work?
I think it’s about being a woman. I don’t think it’s necessarily the same now for younger women, but I’m a 50-year-old, middle-aged white woman from a very particular period of history in the UK. In a lot of my younger experience I was slightly marginalised or wasn’t really acknowledged. There was obviously a lot of misogyny in the 70s and the 80s – a lot of sexism. These things still exist.
The work isn’t autobiographical, it’s not about me, but it’s about having empathy when I go into archives and collections and noticing similarities between now and then. I can’t not bring my own lived experience to my process as an artist.
I’m looking outwards to look in, in a way. I like to think about what connects us and how to make the past feel contemporary. What I’m trying to do is activate a collection so that the audience experiences that in the present and uses that understanding to change something.
There was a moment when I was working in an archive in Cardiff and I realised ‘this is my history, this is our history as women, but I can’t see it. It’s in a load of archival files in a box, in a locked room somewhere. Why isn’t this history visible and available for us to experience?’
At Fruitmarket, I wanted it to be a celebration of the women that showed here, and so bringing them out and being able to see them as a collective is the history of the place.
We are highlighting these women within the gallery, but how do you imagine that can continue outside of this space? Is that something you think about (despite it not being something you or I are necessarily responsible for)?
The more you work with a number of archives at once, the more you realise the enormity of it, and that this is happening in every single archive and collection – not just in the arts but in loads of different walks of life. The contribution that women have made to society and British culture for centuries isn’t as visible as I think it could be.
It would be amazing for there to be some collective shift that enables women’s stories to be equal to everyone else’s, right?
How can audience members try and make this happen?
I think it’s about being curious, isn’t it? If you go somewhere where the narrative is very male and there’s only a particular history being told, ask the invigilators or the people on the front desk, ‘who else lived here?’.
More often than not, people are married and there’ll have been someone else within that partnership. I’m just one person but I hope that there’s a ripple that gives more visibility to other women, and for organisations to be thinking about their own archival collections.
That’s why it’s called The Unforgetting – it’s not about trying to remember, it’s about trying to unforget.
The Unforgetting is on from 19th October till 17th November at Fruitmarket Warehouse, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF. More info here
Main Photo Credit: Neil Hanna
