Close
About
Hear Now, 2023
Hear Now gives a visual shout-out to the working class women of the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). Established in 1914, the ELFS amplified their voices to improve living conditions and campaign to win all women the vote in 1928. From 1918, only women aged over 30 with property rights could vote. Working class women remained excluded.
Due to high levels of illiteracy in east London, the ELFS realised speech was vital to their cause. Led by Sylvia Pankhurst, they offered public speaking lessons so women could project their voices in protest. Hear Now captures the duality of life for the ELFS women, moving daily between domestic and political roles. I imagine their constant switching of tools; putting down a frying pan and picking up a megaphone.
Megaphones often appear in my work as a way to represent the working class voice. Here, they have been cast from a series of megaphones and frying pans that I made in clay. I have sought to play with the formal nature of the architecture, with columns holding wobbly stacks of frying pans, from which spill the megaphones to rally around and encircle the building, forming a defiant chorus of women.
Emma Hart