Carrie on suffragettes

 “Although the suffragettes are now well-known there is actually hardly any visual imagery of them on our streets – we don’t have the monuments, we don’t have the statues that we should have. In fact, there’s not a lot of statues of named women full stop. Surveys in the past couple of years found there are twice as many statues of animals in London than there are of named women. And in the UK as a whole, there are nearly as many statues of men named John than there are of named women!

So it was my privilege, my passion and an absolute honour to go to Aberdeen and celebrate so many different and diverse women, unifying past and present. I relished the opportunity to create a reminder for future generations how hard women had to fight for the rights we take for granted now. The spirit of the suffragettes is alive in Aberdeen and all over the UK, if folk will only employ a mosaic artist like yours truly to give it the profile it deserves!

Carrie on gingerbread ladies

“When I got commissioned to do this work in Ormskirk I quickly picked up on these two things, Vikings and gingerbread. But when I went there to do some research, the library and information centre there had nothing about the gingerbread sellers. I looked online and found this obscure out of print book on eBay about the rags to riches story of the gingerbread ladies of Ormskirk.

I was delighted when I read about them because they were obviously just the kind of larger than life women I love to highlight. The images we have show them dressed up very much like witches – they were big foreboding women who supposedly had to be taken home in a wheelbarrow at night because they were so drunk. When one of their leaders, Sally Woods, died, the most important man in Ormskirk said, ‘There goes a person that was feared [by] no woman, man nor beast!’.

So I created a mosaic with an image of a Viking chasing a group of gingerbread people down the road and put the ‘gingerbread women’ in the Viking’s shield. Celebrating the achievements of these working-class women, putting them in the centre of the story is my way of reminding people of Ormskirk, where you can hardly move without bumping into gingerbread, that it owes it all to these ballsy women. I bet if it was men who did it there would be plaques all round town about Mister so and so… Well, those women are up there on the wall now. I’d love to see the book get reprinted and see what others can do with their story.

Carrie on English Hedonists

“Teddy Baden, who started the Whitecross Street Party, asked me if I’d do something site specific for him one year so I had a look around the local history and discovered Whitecross Street in Islington was famed in the 17^th century for its gin palaces and whorehouses. The last stop before you entered London. I found this obscure blog that talked about Priss and John Garfield’s book. Firstly I thought it was hilarious there was a ‘“’Wandrin’ Whore guide’, and I thought Priss was the complete opposite of whoever would normally get a blue plaque. So I thought it would be a funny thing to do, subverting the whole blue plaque thing.

At that point I’d made a couple of other English Hedonist plaques for my own venues, but Priss was my first blue plaque about a public figure and she’ll always be one of my favourites.”

Since Carrie enshrined Priss Fotheringham on London’s walls, she’s had a lot more attention from all sorts of people, not least the fabulous sex historian Kate Lister, who features Carrie’s blue plaque on her Whores of Yore Sex Workers Timeline. So next time you’re in London, see how many English Hedonist plaques you can collect!

Carrie on Mrs Shakespeare

“When I looked into Anne Hathaway, there’s not a lot about her, history doesn’t know anything and yet if you read all the scholars and all the books and all the men who have written about her, there’s either one of two things. She’s either some old trollop, a whore that bagged Shakespeare, or she’s some kind of puritanical, humourless virgin, all of the ways that people label women to demean them.

So I dug around and I played around a bit and created some work that explores Anne in a new way and looked at what it would have been like if they’d been around today. I wanted to re-invent her as a living, breathing passionate woman. We created merch, and magazine covers and we took a leaf out of Mister Shakespeare’s book and used a bit of profanity and toilet humour.

Carrie on Unfit Mother

“At the time I had three kids and I was heavily in debt. I mean, it was difficult – I was a single parent on my own. He wrote me an email that said, ‘How would you feel if I made a piece of art and called it The Unfit Mother?’ I was like, ‘How dare you! You don’t get to do that. You can’t call me unfit because I’m looking after our kids!’ At the time, I wasn’t getting money, I wasn’t getting help. I was so angry about it that I thought, ‘Do you know what? I’m having that.’ If you’re gonna call me an Unfit Mother I’m gonna live that role.

My friend Lady Muck makes fabric patches and I asked her to make me one that said Unfit Mother and I’ll wear it forever more. She made me the patch, and we took them to the Art Car Boot Fair and it was the biggest selling patch she ever made, because it’s one of those things that hits a nerve. Because what’s the equivalent for a Dad? You wouldn’t even call a Dad ‘Bad Dad’ or ‘Deadbeat Dad’. That guilt is always attached to the mother.

I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling incredibly guilty as a mother. I would argue you can’t have a career, you can’t be an artist, you can’t do all these things and be a mother. You can’t do these things as a single parent, so something has to give. For me, I couldn’t be anything other than an Unfit Mother. I had to be an Unfit Mother, struggling to be a single parent on my own, with kids. If a father goes off to India for 6 months because their career takes them there nobody cares. But me? What, going away for 2 weeks? What about your kids? That guilt is only attached to the mother. And I thought it was so wrong of him So I started making a whole series of works, putting it on plates.

And Unfit Mother has informed a lot of the work I have done since then. It informed ShakespeariAnne. It was part of all of that, exploring women and womanhood and what gets said about women. And it’s informed almost everything that’s come since.

In a way, a lot of my work, especially as I get older, a lot of my personal work and the work I’d like to do exploring crones is about those negative external things that are said about women. Think of the names attached to women as they get older. Hag, crone, battle axe, they’re all derogatory.

I think, as you get older, women get to a certain age and they become an old crone and they try to shut us down. As they get past the menopause they’re no longer fanciable, or fuckable, they become the old crone. Historically you can see they’re usually asked to shut up and I think you can see that now in today’s climate.