Dinah Vagina: Any feelings About This?

About

Femicide: noun

the killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man and on account of her gender

In 2012 Karen Ingala Smith began collecting the names of women murdered in the UK where the principle perpetrator was a man, she brought together all those isolated incidents, from those that hit the headlines to those that didn’t make the press at all. The 135 cases of murder of women in 2012 have been completed.

Men get killed too of course, but mostly by men.

Male violence is the issue.

The work in this exhibition comments on the women’s lives ended in 2012 by men, often by the men they loved and cared for, their husbands and lovers, fathers, brothers, sons and grandsons, close family or the partners of close family.

Of the 135 only 11 were killed by strangers; the men who hurt us most aren’t lurking on the street after dark, they’re sat on the sofa waiting for us to come home, they sit with the kids at the kitchen table, they lie next to us in bed. “

“Dinah Vagina went to university aged 50 and emerged a changed women, enlightened; she stood raw, on the brink of an art world she did not understand and she continues to grope, to feel her way, to search for a path. Work, mostly in ceramic, stacks up, it covers walls and windowsills, fills studio and attic. Solo shows in Cardiff, indoors and out, work in group shows, work on the internet allow small inroads but the desire to change the world, to change the place of women in it, is huge and clamorous. There is much work to do.”