Rose English at Tate Britain (2020)
Jansley Lansley, a long time collaborator of Rose English, was part of English’s Quadrille 1975/2013 installation in Tate Britain’s ‘Walk Through Art: 60 years’.
The work was comprised of a Super 8 mm silent film that documents Rose English’s first full-scale performance art event, together with the costumes worn by the performers and photographic documentation of the event in the form of twenty black and white photographs and three colour photographs. The performance took place in the dressage arena of the Southampton Horse Show in 1975, in front of an audience who were there to watch the equestrian events. The work was commissioned by the Southampton Festival of Performance Art.
Quadrille explores the fetishisation of women’s bodies with humour and ambivalence. It was produced at a time when performance and its documentation were being claimed as important territory for feminist art. English was part of a generation of women artists in Britain in the 1970s, which included Rose Finn-Kelcey, Alexis Hunter and Carolee Schneemann, who sought to use the female body to highlight and dismantle oppressive cultural constructs that defined gender roles.
The performers in Quadrille were Joanna Bartholomew, Sally Cranfield, Helen Crocker, Maedée Duprès, Jacky Lansley and Judith Katz.