MAIR

Mair in the television film “Miss World 1970: feminists and flour bombs”

Shown on UK Channel 4 television on Sunday 13 January 2002 at 8 p.m.

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Coming out of art school in 1970, and realizing that there were no women in jobs in fine art departments in art schools and hardly any women exhibiting in galleries, I became very angry and frustrated. Then one evening when I was living in London I heard on the radio that women were demonstrating at the Albert Hall about discrimination against women, and I heard the words "women's inequality in society", so I got straight on the bus and joined them.  I didn't know what "patriarchy", "male chauvinism" and all those slogans meant, but I joined in the shouting.  Within a few minutes, though, I was arrested and to my great surprise I was headline news in the next day's newspapers.

Now, thirty years on, they’ve made a film about those Miss World events, produced and directed by Philippa Walker. They've asked those people who were there, including Miss UK of the time (she’s a farmer now), what they thought about it all.  For me, that isn’t really the point: I talk about art, and in the film there is a sequence from my dance film of 1970 “Ballet in Powys Square”, as well as no less than six of my paintings. 

Here’s another of my paintings which was in the film:

Sleepwalker

This is a later painting influenced by the ideas of Kristeva.  People see the world or reality through a language (including sociological or political languages or –isms), so since so many people see the world in so many different languages, we must all be sleepwalking.  This wasn't entirely clear in the film: instead, it seemed to give the impression that it was only I who was sleepwalking rather than the concept that we are all sleepwalking which is what I said in the filming.

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