Travellers who pass through Stansted airport in Essex over the next four months will be able to view a radically original touring exhibition of the work of women artists from around the globe. One hundred boxes, featuring a huge range of art forms, go on display from today, International Women's Day. They will remain at the airport, accessible to all visitors, until the end of June, when the curators hope to show them in London for at least a week before they travel to Athens on the next leg of their journey.
The show is called Women/ Beyond Borders (W/BB) and its British visit constitutes the millennial exhibition by the London-based Foundation for Women's Art, which was launched in 1992 as the Museum of Women's Art. The FWA persuaded the airline KLM and BAA to co-sponsor the Stansted display, and most of the boxes, which are made from pine and are about the size of a large chocolate box, are in KLM's departure lounge.
It seems fitting that these exquisitely decorated artefacts, from which explode displays of painting, sculpture or found objects (with the box as part of the artwork) should be displayed in an airport, since they have been circling the earth since their creation.
The W/BB "mail art" project was started by two American artists, Lorraine Serena and Elena Siff, at Santa Barbara, California, in 1992. Their idea was to devise a travelling show "to honour and connect women on a global, grass-roots, collaborative basis". They sent self-assembly kits to curators in 15 countries, who each invited 12 women artists to transform a box into a work of art. The pieces were first shown in Santa Barbara in 1995; now there are 400 boxes, and W/BB shows have been staged in 26 countries. The Stansted show is the first in the UK. The participating artists have agreed to give up ownership of their works for the permanent collection that Serena and Siff intend to establish in California next year. While the W/BB exhibition is in this country, a number of British women artists and women in public life will construct their own boxes, to add to an already diverse collection.
The chair of the FWA, Barbara Grundy, used to run a commercial gallery in London, and took on the job of organising the MWA/FWA at the end of last year. Since then the FWA has identified a suitable exhibition space in central London, one that is not currently used for showing art.
The FWA has not yet secured funding for a permanent space, though Grundy will oversee the preparation of a new application to the heritage lottery fund.
So far, a lack of funds has restricted the FWA to mounting about one show a year, at other people's galleries. Previous exhibitions have included the work of the tragic and neglected Cynthia Fell, who died in a psychiatric hospital in 1977 aged 44.
An earlier show highlighted the work of Charlotte Salomon, a Jewish artist working in wartime Europe who entrusted her "visual autobiography" of 1,300 gouaches to a French friend before she was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1943, aged 26.
Grundy describes the W/BB project as "an example of women at the end of a century of intense change, showing solidarity with one another and looking at where we've got to in relation to our role and place after decades of struggle". The result is an exhibition of masterly creativity and admirable resourcefulness. That doyen of box art, Joseph Cornell, would no doubt approve.
Women/Beyond Borders is at Stansted airport, Essex, till late June. The W/BB website is www.womenbeyondborders.org. The FWA is at 0171-251 4881.
