Margaret Harrison "You have to have a strategy to draw people into the work"

studio international Jan 05, 2016

Margaret Harrison (b1940) has been at the forefront of British feminist and activist art since her solo show of drawings and watercolours – including images of women as hamburger fillings and Captain America with fake breasts and high heels – was closed down on the grounds of “indecency” in 1971. Throughout the 70s and 80s, she collaborated with her husband, Conrad Atkinson, and other female artists, as well as working alone, to produce work documenting the plight of underpaid homeworkers, rape victims, factory workers and more. Her work Rape (1978) was included in the controversial 1979 Arts Council show, Lives, curated by Derek Boshier, where it attracted a lot of attention from the press and public alike.

With a recent revisiting of some of her early works, winning the Northern Art Prize in 2013, and a current survey exhibition, Accumulations, at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Harrison speaks to Studio International about some of her early memories and pioneering projects.

Read the full interview here