Women Talking

A creative conversation about what it is to be a woman; artist Janet Lynch and poet Ellen Phethean

This project brings together two people who want to have a conversation about what it is to be a woman; artist Janet Lynch and poet Ellen Phethean and curated by Miranda Leonard.

In her collection ‘The Quince as an Older Woman’, Ellen Phethen wrote about her life in a world made alien with loss and absence. She acknowledges aging but also the pleasure of grandchildren and the recompense of writing. Her poems explore the older woman’s place in contemporary culture. ‘Shedding the Niceties’ published last year is reviewed as a collection of ‘rambunctious poems that insist on finding their own way home in the dark’

Janet Lynch, now in her 80s, is a painter whose work is full of life that genuinely springs forth from her brush, this current way of working represents a new way of approaching her creativity. She identifies most closely with the ‘Transavantgarde’ movement in Western Europe in the 1980s and this work represents a long period of work returning from abstraction to figuration. She explains: ‘They rely on the emotions provoked by colour, and on strong references linked to mythic imagery and metaphor”

These two artists have had much to discuss through their correspondence of paintings and poems. Since 2020, when their touring show was cut short by Covid 19, they have continued their creative collaboration, and the exhibition at Tremenheere Gallery in 2024 brings together the original 8 paintings plus four new paintings with fresh poems.