Sarah Butcher, Anna Cameron, Pam Crofts, Jan Leo, Robyn McDonald, Raquel Redmond, Lucinda Shaw-Lamont, Ros Stokes, Alison Virtue, Judy Watson
Irons in the Fire is an exhibition presented by the Women's Legal Service to launch the publication of a booklet on Domestic Violence. The need for illustrations in this booklet provided the avenue to the arts. Stock commercial illustrations were found to be dated and unsatisfactory. As with the whole issue of women's activities, time and again it is found necessary to re-pre sent and re -evaluate existing notions of normality and particularly normalisations of the feminine.
Raquel Redmond has produced a series of black and white linocuts for the booklet. Her intensely lined faces and figures of women capture the atmosphere of oppression without recourse to depictions of female fear. The booklet is extremely supportive and informative and marks another milestone along the long slow road to female freedom from fear.
Sally Cameron from the Legal Service and Raquel Redmond invited other artists to put together an exhibition for the booklet launch. The response was enthusiastic and Irons in the Fire (like the Women's Legal Service itself) is a product of joint participation.
Irons in the Fire is an exhibition of diverse content in a wide range of media, including printmaking, sculpture, assemblage, painting, installation and colour laser copy. The ten exhibiting artists are from a range of cultural and racial backgrounds. This diversity is a tribute to feminism and powerfully conveys the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary nature of the exhibition 's central issue-that of domestic violence. it is also a chilling reminder of the subtle and diverse nature of misogyny.
The booklet emphasises the variety of forms covered by the term domestic violence (from verbal and financial abuse to sexual and physical) and the range of situations in which