Frances Phoenix - Art and Life

To celebrate this year's International Lesbian Day, The Women's Library has much pleasure in inviting you to come and enjoy a drink & a nibble, some excellent company and Q&A for this engaging presentation of the work and life of Frances Phoenix, as compiled by herself before she died in 2017.

Due to Frances' key role in a number of groups, shows and collectives, it is both a moving tribute to the working life of an important Australian artist, and a wonderful expose of feminist and lesbian art in Australia from the early 1970s onwards.

5pm for 5.30pm

Look forward to seeing you there!

The Women's Library is fortunate to hold Frances’ art book collection, kindly donated by her sister Sally Cantrill, and you can read the story at https://thewomenslibrary.org.au/phoenix-rising-the-frances-budden-phoenix-collection/

If you want know more about Frances (Budden) Phoenix, her work is held by a number of Australian art galleries. Check out: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/?artist_id=phoenix-frances...

and here is an excerpt from Know My Name (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020):

In 1979 the authors of The D’Oyley Show: An exhibition of women’s domestic fancywork catalogue wrote that ‘the work in this exhibition is not revolutionary’, but to my eyes, as a second‑year student at a regional art school, the work was both revolutionary and revelatory. (1)

It was reported in the 1978/79 edition of feminist art journal Lip that there was only ‘one sole monograph and less than a dozen slides by women artists, out of several thousand’ in my regional art school library. (2)
However, things were changing. Groups like the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, and individual artists, were developing new models of art practice and forging pathways out of the closed‑shop patriarchal art industry.

Established in 1976 by Frances Budden, Joan Grounds, Bernadette Krone, Kathy Letray, Patricia McDonald, Marie McMahon, Noela Taylor and Loretta Vieceli, the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group aimed to elevate and promote women’s domestic needlework — the collective nature of production, the expression of community and the development of a common language. (3) They researched the conditions under which textiles were produced, the functions they served and the beauty of the designs as well as, importantly, producing artwork themselves. (4)

Frances (Budden) Phoenix had a history of working within a feminist framework. In 1975 she made Queen of Spades, a clever reworking of the traditional doily form. Feminist scholar, artist and educator Elizabeth Emery wrote that the Queen of Spades is ‘at once an object of activism as much as it is an object of art; a wholly politicised tribute to the work, bodies and histories of women’. (5) The soft pink cotton doily, delicately crocheted in scallop stitch and complete with plastic zipper, is wryly humorous and subversive.

This sharing of knowledge and discourse through needlework continued in The D’Oyley Show, a major exhibition researched and created by the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group. McMahon’s cotton doily with black, red and yellow glass beads which declared Aboriginaland Land Rights Not Mining, or Phoenix’s artwork demanding Get Your Abortion Laws Off Our Bodies, revived and re-situated the tradition of women inscribing messages into their work. Previously overlooked works by First Nations, working class and migrant women were presented and promoted in the exhibition, catalogue and posters. The posters themselves were beautiful, informative and accessible artworks. The exhibition toured, not only to metropolitan art galleries, but to venues in Broken Hill, Orange, Bathurst, Maitland, Armidale and Lismore.

The groundbreaking work of the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, and artists like Francis (Budden) Phoenix, encouraged and inspired many women to see that it was possible to build dynamic progressive communities of art practice outside of the mainstream. It is thanks to these trailblazers that the insurgency endures, as women continue to create art relevant to those marginalised in an increasingly neo‑liberal world.

by Alison Alder

Honorary Associate Professor Printmedia & Drawing, ANU

Excerpted from Alder, Alison. "Frances (Budden) Phoenix" in N Bullock, K Cole, D Hart & E Pitt (eds), Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020, pp 62–63

(1) Frances Budden et al, The D’Oyley Show: An exhibition of women’s domestic fancywork, Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, Sydney, 1979, p4.
(2) Barbara Campbell, ‘A survey on women’s art and theory courses and feminine sensibility’, in Lip 1978/79, North Carlton, 1979, p61.
(3) Frances Budden changed her name to Frances Phoenix in 1982. See ‘From outlaws to in‑laws: 2015 Australia’s Homosexual Histories Conference’, at prideadelaide.org/ahhc2015/assets/ahhc-2015-abstracts-biographies.pdf, accessed 7 February 2020.
(4) Budden et al, p4
(5) Elizabeth Emery in Michelle Arrow and Angela Woolacott (eds), Everyday revolutions: Remaking gender, sexuality and culture in 1970s Australia, ANU Press, Acton, 2019, p120.