Are You Leaving Yourself Out of Your Own Story? | Reflection Room August Week 1

And the first artwork I'd love to share with you is by artist Coral Woodbury.

So this is a portrait of another artist, Lubiana Himid, and it's been painted directly into a page from something called Janssen's History of Art.

Now, I've not read this.

I've never even heard about it before today.

But apparently, it's one of the world's most influential art history textbooks.

I think all we need to know is that for decades, books like this have largely, you know, kind of overlooked women artists.

So what Coral has done is she created a series called Revised Edition, and she quite literally painted women back into the pages of these books where they should have been all along.

I love this from a feminist perspective.

And her inclusion of Lubiana Himid's work is really cool in my sense, because her artwork covers questions such as who gets remembered, who gets represented and who's been deliberately overlooked.

So she's painted Ljubljana onto a page about another artist called Francisco or Francisco Goya.

And the idea here is that both artists challenge the stories that powerful institutions tell.

So Goya's work, apparently, I'm going to have to go look at this now, is often celebrated for looking beneath appearances.

And he painted kings and queens, but he didn't always flatter them.

And his portraits were supposedly revealing things like power structures and awkwardness that you'd see beneath the surface so i i think in real terms i'd think about you know modern day kind of photos of our royal family and how we like try to we get people on social media who like try to break down um the hidden meaning behind i don't know the way that somebody's walking or how things have been presented it's probably something very similar So Lubiana does something really similar with her own work, her own artwork as an artist.

Her work's asking stories, asking whose stories have been left out, but particularly the lives and contributions of black people.

And it invites us to think about the official versions of the past.

But mostly, though, I just loved the idea that Coral's idea for this series didn't arrive in a studio or in a very quiet, thoughtful place.

She spoke about how it came to her while she was walking in the woods.

And I think that some of my best ideas come to me when I'm out and I'm kind of paying attention to what I'm thinking about.

And that is reflection rather than when I'm sitting trying to make something happen at my desk.

So as I looked at this piece, I was thinking about the stories psychologically that we inherit and the stories we tell ourselves and how actually they probably can be revised.

So from a social identity psychology perspective, this artwork would ask, who do we see as belonging here? And the stories we see repeated in books and galleries do shape our ideas about who can be a leader or, you know, an expert in a particular area in social media, for example.

So when people are left out of those stories, it also influences how other people see, but how we see ourselves.

Carol's work, this revised edition then, with this image of Ljubljana on top of the history book, is an invitation to kind of say, who else's story is missing? And I thought you could do this as a reflection to think, where is your story needing some revision? Perhaps you've been overlooked or rejected.