HIVE PROJECTS | T1+2 Gallery is proud to present Idle Women, an exhibition featuring a group of London’s most exciting emerging female artists. Catherine Bagg, Gabriele Beveridge, Rose O’Gallivan, Niamh Riordan, Poppy Jones and Lise Hovesen will be exhibiting new work at the HIVE’s Whitechapel space between 20th January and 12th February 2010. The show will also feature a solo exhibition from gastronomic artist Antonia Grant.

The show has been organised in homage to a previous generation of female pioneers: the waterborne version of the Land Girls known collectively as the Idle Women. For a three year period between 1943 and 1945 Britain’s canal network was manned by a group of exceptional young women. Responsible for transporting vital war materials between Birmingham and London, the Idle Women – so named after the ‘IW’ on their ‘Inland Waterways’ badges – worked without respite for months at a time, enduring freezing and treacherous conditions with fortitude and humour. The vibrant creativity of these exceptional women was demonstrated by the many personal memoirs and accounts which were published after the war.

The HIVE’s Idle Women exhibition celebrates the work of a group of young women whose artistic endeavours share the intelligence, integrity and creativity of their ancestresses. Dealing with ideas about art and craft, history and architecture, navigation and sonar, and collecting and remembering, the exhibition shows six female artists defiantly taking their place within historical discourses which are traditionally seen as male preserves.

In her work: ‘Here We Stand’ Catherine Bagg uses cast sections of an WW2 radar station floor, the artist’s arduous task referencing the painstaking techniques of early twentieth century tracking techniques. Lise Hovesen’s new video work continues to mine her interest in the Soviets’ Utopian social experiment, whilst Niamh Riordan manipulates the technology of the projector to develop new modes of seeing and processing information. Poppy Jones and Rose O’Gallivan both use printmaking to de-contextualise contemporary images, recreating them as mysterious and archaic symbols. Gabriele Beveridge uses a range of media to deconstruct and reassemble historical narratives, imagining the past as both non-linear and potentially incomprehensible.

Alongside Idle Women the artist Antonia Clare Grant will be creating a sculptural installation and performance work. Inspired by the cookbooks of Marinetti and by her own career as a chef Grant makes ephemeral gastronomic pieces which play with distillation and extraction, exploring the materiality of food as a sculptural material.

Idle Women: 8-10 Greatorex Street, Whitechapel, E1 5NF 20th Jan to 12th Feb, Wed - Sun by appointment, also Saturday30th and Sunday 31st 2-6pm. Private View: Wed 20th Jan, 6.30 - 9.30pm.