With the academic year coming to an end, we are now in the middle of exhibition season in Falmouth. Recent events such as the “Faces of Falmouth” exhibition have been an outlet for the creative energy present in this town. However one recent event hoped to create a space not often seen here.
“Venus presents: Girl” as the name suggests was a celebration of Falmouth’s female artists. Ran by three of Falmouth’s own creative events management students; Fran Quito, Julie Linnea and Hannah Baker, the event showcased the work of exclusively female artists.
Female empowerment is a particularly hot-button topic within the art world with only 5% of major permanent collections in European and American museums being made up of work by female artists. I went down to the event at Small Ships to find out why this matters to the artists showing their work.
Exhibiting visual artist Matilda Butler said: “It’s great to have an exhibition with all women cause we’re just supporting each other, girls are amazing and they can do so much and often they feel like they can’t because they can feel like they’re subordinate almost. Supporting each other, making each other feel comfortable and happy in a safe environment is amazing”
Zoeli Winters’ current work looks at the female body outside of the male gaze, she commented: “It’s really important for young artists to be given opportunity to show their work. Especially this one for female artists, I think in the art world the female presence is really lacking, so I think its amazing what they’ve done here.”
As for why the event was needed within Falmouth’s art scene, one of the events organisers, Fran Quito said: ”I think because in the art world we’re really underrepresented as women and when we did research into the statistics there is less than 30% of art in UK galleries by women but there’s such a presences of talented women artists in this town so we just wanted to provide a platform for them to get excited about their work.”