Holes Big Enough For Women
Liz Murray
1 – 3 April 2022
Preview: Thursday 31 March 2022, 6-8.30pm
Open: Fri-Sun, 12-6pm
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Five Years is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new sculptural and text-based works by Liz Murray. The exhibition title is taken from a news cutting in the artist’s archive of materials that document the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp (1981–2000). Established in resistance to militarism and nuclear proliferation, the camp became internationally renowned as the largest and most effective feminist protest since the suffrage movement. Actions at Greenham that made newspaper headlines were often large scale (Embrace the Base in December 1982 saw over 30,000 women take part) though smaller demonstrations were often reported on for their quirkiness. In 1983 a group of Greenham women – in a break from the usual route to incarceration - broke into Holloway prison in support of other peace camp women arrested and ‘sent down’ for non-payment of court fines. Newspapers reported on the size of wire fence holes the women had made in order to break in and the subsequent embarrassment of police officers on finding a dozen women on the prison roof at dawn. The cut-out holes were described as being ‘big enough for women’, suggesting there is a hole-size through which men do not fit. This corporeal revision of the hetero-normative structures of patriarchy (that oppress and restrict women’s behaviours and movements) demonstrates a queer activist strategy; of not fitting in, of making holes, of performing resistance.
Liz Murray is a London-based artist who works with sculpture, photography, collage, and moving image. A former peace camp participant, Murray remains involved in different forms of social and political activism, communicated most recently in her doctoral project Performing Resistance: The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp as Artwork. She completed her PhD studies in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Her project addresses the ownership and celebration of queer, resistant, and radical histories drawing on a personal archive of feminist and press materials from the 1980’s that trace this historic gendered protest. Murray is a member of several artist-run collectives including Five Years, the Partisan Social Club, and GLAP Collective. She co-authored the Anti-Fascist Newsletter for Five Years, published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest in 2020. Exhibitions include backchat bender, Dyson Gallery, 2021; Twin Advisory Service, Partisan Social Club, Coventry Biennial, 2019; Flight Mode, Assembly Point, London, 2018; Connecting Worlds, Drawing Room, 2014; Format International Photography Festival, Quad, Derby, 2013.
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