Wordmills and Baboons had two outings in March.

There was a piece in the group show at Lot 19 which was part of the Castlemaine State Festival.  The brief was to use the wire frame provided (tent shaped) and make an art work that responded to the theme ‘Before and Beyond’.

The piece was title ‘Fifty Shades of Jane Eyre’

The outside had some lovely generic pages from romance novels, including Jane Eyre and Fifty Shades of Grey.  If you cared to crawl inside the tent you would have seen from the same books, but with passages, sentences, or words highlighted.  These selected words were examples of how in these novels the man is given all of the power and the woman is described as weak, unstable and as prey.

‘.

There were also two workshops run as part of the Fringe Festival. Participants were encouraged to cut and paste words into books, or photocopies of books, and to reverse the gender.  Some people rebelled against this rebellion and chose to create versions of their chosen text where everyone was the same gender.  Go Team.