We Axe for What we Want was commissioned by Gaada as a culmination of their project ‘Weemin’s Wark’, in partnership with Up Helly Aa for Aa, Glasgow Women’s Library and Creative Scotland.
"Weemin's Wark was a dynamic programme of community workshops, cultural research, artist exhibitions, and publishing activities which took place between January 2020 – July 2021. It was developed by Gaada with support from Up Helly Aa for Aa, Glasgow Women’s Library and Creative Scotland.
The project worked to increase the visibility of women’s contribution to contemporary island culture. Weemin’s Wark provided a safe space in which to examine notions of labour for Women and allies who challenge structures of social and institutional inequality."
The publication brings together contributions from Amy Gear, Roseanne Watt, Brooke Palmieri, Holly Graham, Hannah Harkes & Isabel Greenberg. I designed the publication and produced a new comic to celebrate newly-launched Up Helly Aa for Aa Archive. It was printed and bound in Gaada’s workshop in Burra. The paper was trimmed by the Shetland Times, on their massive guillotine.
We Axe For What We Want
105 x 148mm
wire-o bound book
125 pages
Printed 2-colour Risograph: red and blue, on multiple paper stocks
2-colour screen-printed cover with gatefolds
edition of 300
Alongside this publication, I exhibited a series of three Risograph prints at Gaada's Display gallery and designed a flag to celebrate the launch of the book.
The work was subsequently exhibited at Glasgow Women’s Library, at an unprecedented moment where the Up Helly Aa committee announced that women and girls will be allowed to participate in Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa for the first time.
"This exhibition presents an extract from Time in the Archive, Esther’s contribution to We Axe For What We Want, a publication which foregrounds the multiple voices and collaborations of Gaada’s 2020/21 programme Weemin’s Wark.
Through this exhibition and the upcoming publication, Esther presents a personal reading of the Up Helly Aa For Aa archive, informed by contributions including Lynn Abrams’ Myth and Materiality in a Women’s World, as well as many articles and artworks by local people.
The work experiments with comics’ ability to represent time, enabling different temporal moments to interact in conversation. Here – as in the archive – time is not linear and the past is not 'over’."
Photographs by Gaada