SU RICHARDSON: IT’S IN THE BAG

13 May – 21 June 2025/ summer opening by appointment

To mark the opening of Su Richardson’s solo exhibition at Midlands Arts Centre, we are delighted to announce a show of new sculpture at I DE V / l’étrangère.

Celebrated for her mordant and funny use of crochet to address feminist issues, It’s In the Bag focuses on nutrition and the economics of home-making in an era where convenience foods and delivery apps have boomed to meet the needs of a time-poor labour force in search of comfort and ease… but at what cost? In light of recent discoveries in metabolic health and the microbiome popularised by the likes of Chris van Tulleken and Tim Spektor, the challenges of balancing work with home life have brought new dimensions of complexity into the already vexed question of what to have for dinner.

Richardson presents a menu of enticing and handy takeaway bags crammed with ultra-processed goodies ranging from hamburgers and sausage rolls, noodles and baltis, to psychedelic doughnuts and cute-as-pie cupcakes, rendered in bright cotton and metallic yarns. The works are a characteristically sly invitation to a bit of what you fancy, but with lists of ingredients to make you question your choices. Playfully, they point to a desolation behind empty calories and abundance, to the real trade-offs at play when fresh and unprocessed foods weigh more heavily on the wallet than their oven-ready alternatives.

Born in South Shields, Richardson is a central figure in the feminist art scene in her adopted hometown of Birmingham, where together with her friend Monica Ross, she founded the Birmingham Women’s Art Group in 1974. The group started at the local baby clinic and extended across a network of artist mums, many of them single parents, feeling a sense of social and creative isolation, as the structural circumstances of parenting saw them losing their professional identities and status in a society where women had no legal and financial independence from men.

Throughout Britain in the 1970’s, varied and vibrant art scenes were responding to social disparities by creating support systems and spaces for conversation, creative exchange and advocacy. They offered practical as well as moral support, with reciprocal childcare arrangements opening up time for women to nurture and build their artistic practices. In a time of analogue communication, where the telephone in the front hall was for many the only source of outside contact, these groups were by their nature local, bonding in real life or not at all.

So it was following a rare moment of convening in 1975 at the Women’s Art History Conference in London where they met artist Kate Walker, that Richardson and Ross other members of BWAG became participants in Walker’s Postal Art Event. Through it, women across the country could not only make works of art, but also circulate them amongst a wider audience of like-minded artists. This expanded creative conversation was an artworld in itself, running alongside the more conventional channels that women continued to be excluded from, but which have gradually converged over decades of social change and succeeding generations, and celebrated in recent exhibitions such Tate’s Women In Revolt! and Hayward Touring’s Acts of Creation.

Trained in graphic design and looking to make light and unbreakable artworks suitable for posting, Richardson married her communication skills with her lifelong love of textiles by teaching herself to crochet. This began a series of sculptures on the subjects of motherhood, domesticity and abuse, but also women’s sexual health across life, illness and the aging body. The deliberate subversion of needlework, falling traditionally within the realm of domestic duties and womanly accomplishments, is itself a political reframing and whilst provocative in its time, is no less so today as Richardson’s subject matter has evolved.

Su Richardson

Birmingham-based artist Su Richardson (b. 1947) is a pioneer of British Feminist Art known for her celebration, exploitation and subversion of traditional feminine skills such as crocheting. Her humorously subversive aesthetic anticipated contemporary countercultures and movements that combined craft with street art, such as yarn bombing and guerilla knitting, and was a precursor to a younger generation of female British artists who combined visual puns with domestic objects, including perhaps most notably Sarah Lucas in her seminal works Self Portrait with Fried Egg (1996) or Pauline Bunny (1997). 

After studying graphic design, Richardson moved to Birmingham as a secondary school art teacher in the 1970s, when she met Monica Ross and Phil Goodall, who together formed the Birmingham Women's Art Group. She was instrumental in co-organising the Postal Art Event that took place across Britain in the mid-1970s, which evolved into the ground-breaking project Feministo, and a series of exhibitions and installations around the UK, including the acclaimed presentation Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife at the ICA, London in 1977. Other shows included Issues curated by Lucy Lippard at ICA, London (1980); Alternative Images of Men at Bakehouse, London (1980); Women and Textiles at Battersea Arts Centre (1983).

Richardson began actively exhibiting again in the 2010s after taking a break in her art career to raise her son and worked as an art and design teacher, musician, arts administrator, and more recently, as a client advisor and receptionist in the health sector -- all the while continuing to create within the confines of her home.

Since then, her work has featured in solo and group exhibitions at Howard Gallery at Goldsmiths, London (2012); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015); Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee (2016); Raven Row, London (2017); Women Power Protest, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (2018); l'étrangère, London (2018); Graves Gallery, Sheffield (2019); Richard Saltoun Gallery (online, 2020); and Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2023).

Two touring exhibitions in 2024-25, Tate’s Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 and the Hayward’s Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, have further broadened the audience and critical interest in her work.

Su Richardson’s soft sculptures have been acquired by public collections including Tate, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and The Science Museum, London, and private collections in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Su Richardson: In Stitches is at the Midlands Arts Centre until 1 June 2025.

Photography: Stephen White & Co.

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