“Womb Magic”

This year Sam Ainsley (b.1950) celebrated her 75th birthday in style with a ticketed fundraiser “Never Go Out” at SWG3 for a film by Marissa Keating which will document the rise of the Glasgow art scene since Ainsley’s tenure in 1985. That evening, Ainsley wore a cape emblazoned with her chief slogans: conscience, passion, imagination. The gesture mimicked a moment earlier in her career when she made a dress out of leftovers from her banner for “The Vigorous Imagination” (1987). While she has long been considered a veteran pedagogue of art school education in Scotland, the surrealist legacies and feminist politics underpinning her own artistic practice present unchartered terrains.

Ainsley uses collage as a form of resistance inherited from a feminist-surrealism and combined with a second-wave feminist approach. As her former student, Christine Borland (b.1965), recently pointed out “Sam incorporates textile practice at a sculptural scale.”1 Indeed, Ainsley’s teaching has long been pulling at the seams of the “handicrafts” as a traditionally feminine undertaking, translating and upgrading such processes into explicitly feminist concerns.2 Ainsley’s resulting maximalism and the technical know-how functions on the edge between representation and abstraction, concept and expression. She is specifically interested in the painterly collage approaches of Eileen Agar and Kay Sage, and how they embed their landscapes with corporeal matters. Ainsley explains in our interview that she was looking actively at the surrealist work of Agar and Sage in the mid-1980s while preparing for her landmark solo show “Why I choose red” (1987), and that it was likely a combination of Whitney Chadwick’s reproductions and Ainsley’s own fieldtrips to American art museums.3

Agar’s notion of “womb magic” (production rather than reproduction) is updated by Ainsley through her interest in microscopic and medical imaging.4 Biomorphic forms and cellular structures become floating islands. Ainsley’s small drawings are often expanded into epic banners and giant collages, often using the gallery walls as a convenient support. This effect is particularly compelling in The Idea of North (2023) a recent installation at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. Here, the cartographic shapes of her personal geography, including her home region of Northumbria, comingle as a series of five floating islands. Her obsession with this compass-point is political and comes from her extensive reading of Yi-Fu Tuan and D’Arcy Thompson, Peter Davidson and Gavin Francis. In Ainsley’s feminist hands, these land masses have further morphed into a series of vital organs (heart, lungs, stomach, womb) while retaining their tectonic appearance. Bones become scaffolds and muscles become branches building on the looped drapery, figurative architecture and lonely landscape of Sage’s I SawThree Cities (1944). This is no mere mother earth cliché but rather an activist call to rewild and reappreciate.5 I am reminded of a famous Leonora Carrington quotation: “Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood stream.”6

Ainsley’s interest in a bodily topography and the layering technique of collage is further revealed in the archaeological content of What Lies Beneath (2023) and in the trompe l’oeil tear of Self-Portrait with Celtic Woman Ghost (2017). In the former, the skeleton hints at memento mori while the sinewy organ appears to pulsate with life, renewing the ground under which it has been buried. In the latter, a Pictish warrior woman offers Ainsley’s distinctive self-presentation (of blonde bob and statement necklace) a political thought bubble while the circular embroidery hoop loops back to reflect on her own art school training—a complicated moment which shaped her firm sense of resolve. For Ainsley, collage is a hybrid medium capable of layering her commitment to a second-wave feminist politics as well as an ecocritical awareness.