A Woman’s Work is an artistic collaboration by Emma Dolan and Isabelle Tracy.
Both studied in Leeds during the 1980s, and followed diverging artistic paths in relation to their approaches to concept, making, and socially engaged practice. They shared a common experience in respect of 1980s Leeds as a feminist crucible, where responses to the multiple murders of women by Peter Sutcliffe included West Yorkshire Police’s description of Jackie Hill as an innocent victim, and the Reclaim The Night marches.
A Woman’s Work began their collaboration after meeting at a workshop to make EL-wire ‘neon’ placards celebrating the centenary of partial women’s suffrage, in Leeds. As they marched along to a samba band in a parade led by giant suffragette puppets, they reflected on the progress made and not made since their grannies got the vote, and since Sutcliffe was jailed. They concluded that the old saw was right - A Woman’s Work Is Never Done.
A Woman’s Work produced new work for and curated an exhibition of feminist art at the 2020 UCL conference commemorating 50 years since the first Women’s Liberation Conference and the original demands of the movement. A wider gallery tour was truncated due to Covid. They then made craftivist interventions in response to the creation and maintenance of the Leeds Managed Zone, in which men were able to prostitute and traffic women without threat of prosecution, leading inevitably to more men traveling greater and greater distances to do so. The impact on schoolchildren and prostituted women became a profound reminder of the palpable feelings of not being safe that haunted Leeds in the 1970s and 80s, and they began new work on textile maps and psychogeography. Current work includes the establishment of a women’s workshop, after the 1970s model of the Leeds Pavilion.
A Woman’s Work is a feminist collaborative practice which draws on a network of other women artists, musicians and technicians.
