Dreams and Nightmares: Margaret Harrison

Margaret Harrison appeared on the cultural scene of the second wave of British feminism, which emerged as the heir to the birth of trade unionism, the creation of labour rights and the suffragettes. In this period, marked artistically by the triumph of pop, minimalism and conceptual art, she sought an aesthetic of her own that would respond to her political activism. She began a series of drawings with hypersexualised characters in which she made explicit the asymmetry in the representation of men and women, but in the London of the early 1970s her production was so far ahead of its time that it could only be seen as irreverent. So much so that her first solo exhibition was closed down after being declared indecent by the police the day after it opened.

Harrison deliberately subverts traditional gender norms with grotesque characters in images charged with humour, irony and pastiche. This process of subversion would become one of the artist's most effective political-artistic weapons until the forced closure of her first exhibition led her to explore new creative avenues. This is how she began a series of long-term projects, combining painting and archiving, to investigate the working conditions of the working class in rural areas. One of the first sociological investigations she undertook was a study of women's work in a metal box factory, together with the artists Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly, which resulted in Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-1975.

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