Saluting The Suffragettes

100 years ago, women achieved the right to vote in Britain. While gender inequality is still very much alive today, it's important to take note of the female journey over the last century, and to mark our respects for the women who fought so hard to get us to where we are today. In Selvedge issue 67, Diana Woolf spotlighted textile artist Elizabeth Loveday, who does just that...

Cornish textile artist and illustrator Elizabeth Loveday delights in the weird and wonderful, and admits she’s generally attracted to dark, slightly odd or disturbing subjects. She makes surreal, often bizarre pictorial textiles inspired by local folk tales and her work ranges from images of mad-looking clowns, mournful performing half human beasts and real life, political activists. ‘I don’t want my work to be cute or beautiful,’ she says, adding, ‘I like things to be a bit dangerous and I want to challenge people’s ideas about what textiles should depict.’

It is unsurprising that Loveday’s Suffragette series, textile portraits of some of the movement’s key figures, is a long way away from the group’s conventional depictions. The images are not direct copies of photographs but rather show Loveday’s imaginative interpretation of the Suffragette experience (both emotional and physical). In the process she turns this pantheon of political heroines into a series of living women. Instead of showing figures such as the formidable Millicent Fawcett as calm and heroic in the face of masculine intransigence, she pictures her as tired and vulnerable, her hair a bird’s nest of grey and her mouth bruised. Loveday’s cameo of Flora Stevenson is haggard with violet shadows under her eyes – possibly an incipient black eye – and her image of Frances Buss shows the great advocate of women's education with a gaping hole where her mouth should be, perhaps in recognition of the way women's voices were silenced at the time.

‘The Suffragettes weren’t necessarily beautiful, perfect people. They were real people, fighting. They might have been heroic in their actions but they weren’t once they were in Holloway, and in the end many of them were quite damaged – they were really mistreated and battered – it was appalling,’ she explains. Loveday started her Suffragette series after she came across some of their old marching songs and poems. Intrigued, she researched further, reading up on the movement and searching out old photographs of the women as well as pictures of non-political prisoners in Holloway at the same time...

You can read Diana Woolf's article in full in Selvedge issue 67.