PAST EVENT: This was part of the EAF25 programme.

In 2022, as part of the festival, Arusha Gallery presented Weathering is what I would like to do well, bringing together paintings, textiles and installations by Rosa Lee, Barbara Levittoux-Swiderska and Shelagh Wakely.

Rosa Lee was a Hong Kong-born artist and feminist theorist, creating a new type of decorative abstraction within the UK that dismantled the hierarchy of fine art over craft. In doing so, she raised questions about the validity of the modernist conventions and reclaimed the position of women within the history of painting.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Barbara Levittoux-Świderska transformed tapestry from flat decorations to avant-garde installations, following the Eastern European tradition by incorporating locally sourced materials and rural practices to improvise new textile art-making methods and forms. 

Shelagh Wakely was part of the alchemy of the British Sculpture Movement of the 1980s, producing an impressive body of work comprising sculpture, installation, drawings, prints and video. A pioneer of installation art, her artworks are illusionary plays on perception that disturb patterns of thinking and seeing and are characterised by tender marks, ghost-like and evanescent, made with a variety of media: from clay to wire, cut silk to gilded fruit, ink on paper to canvas.