This experimental arts project in which Fran Norton and Lisa Richardson collaborate, emerged through talking, laughing, drawing, making and lecturing alongside one another. It aims to investigate creative strategies of potential use to others. Current debates around gender fluidity, biology and sexuality are complex and require sensitivity, whilst women over 50 have long been under-represented artistically, politically, philosophically, academically and culturally. Negative associations prevail of the menopause as problematic, barren, dried-up and unproductive.
Both menopausal women-artists, we wish to celebrate this potentially liberating phase of life as a rich arena for transformative experience and artistic enquiry. We hope to find fresh visual languages with which to articulate our related experiences, from self-deprecation and medication to a new sense of freedom and adventure.
Our collaborations began with working across the studio from one another and responding to the same resonant words in our sketchbooks
And as we were talking, drawing, reading and thinking, I became preoccupied with the idea of how raising awareness to the menopause comes hand in hand with being targeted by those pharmaceutical companies supposedly concerned with out well-being.
