the climax of it, actually, in which Woolf compares the process of creating to casting her line into the depths of her imagination like a ‘fisherwoman’, letting it ‘sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being’. Then, as the line drifts and the thought flows, something happens,

The problem of Hannah Wilke is the central problem in this book, and that is the problem of beauty for feminism. When she was beautiful, they told her to stop taking her clothes off. When she was dying, they applauded the bravery of taking off her clothes. She was not a better artist when she was dying. She was not a better artist for having

According to the teratologist (that is, the theorist of monstrosity) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, we can understand a culture by what it calls monstrous; the monster stands for everything a society attempts to cast out.26 Monsters dwell at borders; you might even say the border creates the monster.

Schneemann, that […] our best developments grow from works which initially strike us as ‘too much’: those which are intriguing, demanding, that lead us to experiences which we feel we cannot encompass, but which simultaneously provoke and encourage our efforts. Such works have the effect of containing more than we can assimilate; they maintain

For me, when I started making the tapestries that you’re speaking to specifically, one of the problems I felt like I was encountering – and which is always a problem with the work – is that people kind of sit in its prettiness, and its buoyancy, and its tactility, and its shine; but I wanted to find a way that somehow made that difficult to just

To work in performance was to stick two fingers up to the art establishment: it can’t be preserved on a canvas – only on film, but that’s not the same thing.

Anything women say about their lives is suspect, especially if there’s a white man nearby with a different account of things.

Ann Hamilton, who asked her students – mostly young women – to carry around a 4 × 8 sheet of plywood with them for a week, so they could get used to taking up more space, and realise how often they apologised for themselves. Hamilton’s own success may have been partly due to the ‘sheer scale and ambition of her work from the outset’, unusual when

But the art monster problem, more primary, nagged at me for years before my son was born; it was more to do with having grown up a white American female at the end of the twentieth century, groomed to be appropriate, exacting, friendly and accommodating, as pretty and as small as I could make myself, yet filled with rage at not being allowed to