Irene, Jessie, Elsie and May; 100 Women in Health

Trails and Tails was a heritage project run by East Dunbartonshire Council. Built around community engagement with local history, the project culminated in myself and six other artists commissioned to make new public works sited along pathways and trails in the area. Public art commissioning often struggles with the weight of ‘local history’. This is particularly pertinent in areas with an industrial past, where the determination is to continually reference male dominated histories, at the expense of female work. East Dunbartonshire, a series of communities North of Glasgow, has such a past, mainly of weaving and mining in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research question here was how could a commissioned artwork address local history in ways more relevant to women in the area? The commission Irene, Jessie, Elsie and May; 100 Women in Health began with meeting senior female pupils in local schools with an interest in science and medicine, as many of the sites bordered the remains of former Victorian hospital estates. Significantly, the project examined the experiences of these young women in relation to earlier generations, focussing on education and healthcare as a route for women to gain independence. Local knowledge and rigorous research identified Healthcare as an equally strong ‘local industry’ that remained active – from the provision of care homes in the area to the number of medical professionals living there (from nurses, GP’s and surgeons to care-home assistants/ home-helps). This workforce was, and remains, predominantly female. The hypothesis was to gather 100 names as markers of past/ present female contribution to inform sculpture; methods included arranged meetings between young medical students and retired local doctors, questionnaires distributed locally and archival research of Glasgow University Medical School records to identify local female graduates (dating from 1892). This process identified many more than 100, yet the final work had to accommodate all who might be included. Hence the final permanent sculptures used the un-attributed but common first names Irene, Jessie, Elsie and May as a reference to the many. Full names of all women were made public through a poster edition and multiples (T-shirts, badges, tote bags) distributed via local libraries.