Saturday 8th March 2025

International Women's Day

Join us at the museum to celebrate International Women’s Day 2025! Spectacular photography and artworks, as well as coffee, cake and bubbles.

This year, with a nod to the official (but rather corporate) theme of Accelerate Action, we’re Curating Action with a new museum display produced by our volunteers using “commoning” as a curatorial practice.

[…] the whole curatorial process can be considered a shared project, in which different groups and diverse subjects come together and contribute to a process that might end in a curatorial event, then social demands might also resonate in this project, but not by fixing these social and political problems and related demands, but in negotiating them.

Dorothee Richter, 2022

And, as women, we still have a lot to negotiate …

The Feminist Project for Rural Arts

Detail from Mind the Margins © Monica C LoCascio

The finale of  Chapter 2 of the Feminist Project for Rural Arts, where Monica’s artwork incorporating the Gloucestershire SCOBY will be unveiled.

Screenings

The Duality of Nature is an experimental video that deals with the “duality of nature”, in other words natural nature and technical nature. Nature is always a construction, whether in dynamic processes, dis-analog systems or physical, technical signals. “Nature” formulates the organizational forms of representational strategies – symbolic structures, both in reality and in fiction.

Where are the borders, the interfaces, the de-bordering and the analogies for “natural” nature and “technical” nature? These considerations provided the basis for the video.

(VALIE EXPORT from Sixpack film website)

From The Duality of Nature © VALIE EXPORT, Courtesy of Sixpack Film

The Duality of Nature – VALIE EXPORT

Not only offering another link between SCOBY and feminist art, but very relevant to today’s zeitgeist is The Duality of Nature, a 2-minute performance piece by VALIE EXPORT.

We will be screening this on International Women’s Day at 12:00; 14:00 and 15:00.

Screened Loop

The story of the Gloucestershire SCOBY from its humble arrival on IWD 2024 to its transformation into an artwork.

Performance

Back in the day, women were expected to be experts in tablecraft…

For the 1960s housewives of Beverley Hills, using the wrong table linen was considered a social faux pas and would have ruined reputations. Thankfully, we have Wendy on our team, who knows the difference between the coaster for the canapes and the doily for the drinks. Alongside a selection of her vintage family table linen, Wendy will be creating conversational performance pieces throughout the day, with a bit of a nod to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.

Dangerous Work © Rita Long

Local Creatives

Local artists have taken on the challenge of visualising unpaid labor using different materials including SCOBYs grown from a shared Gloucestershire culture. From a medieval collage to a pair of rubber gloves, the results of their year-long experiment in material and concept is on display until April 27, 2025

Filter

Activism & Protest

Museum Display: Objects from artists of the Feminist Avant Garde. Until 27 April

Mr Marguerite Byrd?

Dorothy Wilding Display. Curated by Sarah Grant a commentary on women’s identity through the lens of Dorothy Wilding and the pen of Tonia Collett.

Display: Feminists of the Avant Garde

Museum Display: Objects from artists of the Feminist Avant Garde. Until 27 April

Get Involved

Collective Collage

Stand with us this IWD weekend.  We’re creating a powerful collage to protest the ongoing war on women, standing in strong solidarity with women overseas.   Add your voice and vision to a collective artwork

DIY Curation

Join the conversation! We’re building a collective display with feminist postcards. Pick your favourites, arrange them on the whiteboard, photograph your creation, and contribute to our commons wall. Activity designed by Sophia MacAdam and Jane Morgan.