Margaret Harrison (born Wakefield; 1940)studied at the Carlisle College of Art (now University of Cumbria), the Roayal Academy Schools, Royal Academy and the Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia, Italy. Harrison is a radical feminist artist who has been practicing since the late sixties. She was one of founders of the London Women’s Liberation Art Group in 1970. In 1971 an exhibition of her work was closed by the police, particularly for the depictions of male bodies, for example her iconic image of Hugh Hefner as a Bunny Girl.

Harrison collaborated with artists Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly to conduct a study of women’s work in a metal box factory in Bermondsey, London, which they presented in the installation Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-1975. The exhibition told the stories of working women who participated in the project and offered an account of the participants’ relationship to the workplace, as well as reflections on the changes brought about by the 1970 Equal Pay Act (EPA).

Mrs. Softie (I) is one of Harrison’s controversial 1971 works which she says ‘doesn’t look very much different from something any of the Pop artists might be doing at the time, but my thoughts were in a different place, I was hearing them talking about women and food all the time, talking about women as recipes’ so she had ‘described women as food, literally put them in food.’[1]  

[1] TATE, TateShotes: Margaret Harrison, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-margaret-harrison

Glossary

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Metal

    Metal is a medium frequently used by artists to make art works - from sculpture to printmaking. Surfaces can display an array of colours and textures, and are capable of being polished to a high gloss; metal can be melted, cast, or fused, hammered into thin sheets, or drawn into wire.