Idle Women features UCF graduates

Five graduates from University College Falmouth will be exhibiting in the Idle Women Exhibition at the HIVE / T1+2 Gallery, featuring a group of London's most exciting emerging female artists. BA(Hons) Fine Art graduates, Cat Bagg, Rose O'Gallivan, Poppy Jones and Lise Hovesen join BA(Hons) Photography graduate, Gabriele Beveridge to exhibit new work at HIVE/ T1+2 Gallery's Whitechapel space between 20 January and 7 February. The show will also feature Niamh Riordan with a solo exhibition from gastronomic artist Antonia Grant.

The show has been organised in homage to a previous generation of female pioneers: the waterborne version of the Land Girls known collectively as the Idle Women. For a three year period between 1943 and 1945 Britain's canal network was manned by a group of exceptional young women. Responsible for transporting vital war materials between Birmingham and London, the Idle Women - so named after the ‘IW' on their ‘Inland Waterways' badges - worked without respite for months at a time, enduring freezing and treacherous conditions with fortitude and humour. The vibrant creativity of these exceptional women was demonstrated by the many personal memoirs and accounts which were published after the war.

The HIVE's Idle Women exhibition celebrates the work of a group of young women whose artistic endeavours share the intelligence, integrity and creativity of their ancestressess. Dealing with ideas about art and craft, history and architecture, navigation and sonar, and collecting and remembering, the exhibition shows six female artists defiantly taking their place within historical discourses which are traditionally seen as male preserves.

In her work, Here We Stand, Cat Bagg uses cast sections of a World War 2 radar station floor, the artist's arduous task referencing the painstaking techniques of early twentieth century tracking techniques. Lise Hovesen's new video work continues to mine her interest in the Soviets' Utopian social experiment, whilst Niamh Riordan manipulates the technology of the projector to develop new modes of seeing and processing information. Poppy Jones and Rose O'Gallivan both use printmaking to de-contextualise contemporary images, recreating them as mysterious and archaic symbols. Gabriele Beveridge, uses a range of media to deconstruct and reassemble historical narratives, imagining the past as both non-linear and potentially incomprehensible.

Alongside Idle Women the artist, Antonia Clare Grant will be creating a sculptural installation and performance work. Inspired by the cookbooks of Marinetti and by her own career as a chef, Grant makes ephemeral gastronomic pieces which play with distillation and extraction, exploring the materiality of food as a sculptural material.

Idle Women is showing at 8-10 Greatorex Street, Whitechapel, E1 5NF from 20 January to 7 February.

For further information about BA(Hons) Fine Art at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/fineart, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 214376.

For further information about BA(Hons) Photography at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/photography, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 214380.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name.  It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing.  The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012/2013 that will be unique to the South West. 

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email:  jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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