Patrick Taylor Artist

THIS EXHIBITION at BL6 Studios from 2nd to 11th October is sixty imagined portraits and scenes centred on British women in later life. It imagines women born around 1955 or earlier and who grew up in social conditions very different from those of today.

The exhibition is not intended as a party-political statement, but it does reflect the circumstances in which these women grew up. They are women who possess age: who carry it as experience, memory, endurance and authority. Age here is not treated as gradual disappearance but as a condition of presence. These women have not faded out of significance. They ask to be looked at properly.

Some of the images are about the loneliness and infirmity that can develop with age. Others are about women in later life who have recovered something of the person they were ‘born to be’, having stepped beyond social structures that once constrained them. But they all grew up in a time which left its legacy.

You hear women speak, or write, about the careers they might have had, the independence they could not afford, and opportunities that were not available to women of their generation. It was not so long ago that marriage and motherhood were widely regarded as a woman’s primary roles, with the husband expected to be the main breadwinner, earning the greater income and eventually, in many cases, receiving the greater pension.

Legislation both reflected and accelerated enormous social change: the Abortion Act 1967, the Divorce Reform Act 1969, the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Employment Protection Act 1975 were among the changes that altered the legal and economic landscape in which women lived.

Some older women I know remember a time when obtaining credit or buying something on hire purchase could mean being asked for a husband’s signature or a male guarantor, regardless of their own ability to pay. Practices that now seem extraordinary are within living memory.

The images are also a reaction against ageism and a culture which places enormous value on youth and conformity to ideals promoted through advertising, influencers and social media. I sometimes wonder, too, whether we have become less comfortable with eccentricity — with people simply looking, dressing and behaving as themselves rather than as they are expected to.

I am not a social scientist or a politician. The exhibition is not a history lesson and it is not about ‘women’s lib’. I just make images. I hope these images portray older women as alive as people of any age. They are presented as real people in every sense: vivid, watchful, dignified, vulnerable, theatrical, resilient, humorous, self-conscious, beautiful, sometimes sensual, sometimes down on their luck, uncertain, and still fully present.

I have usually given them names: Edith, Annie, Elise, Edna, Ida, Ruth, Gabrielle, Margaret and Paula. Only one is deliberately named ‘Lady without a name’.

Names matter at any stage of life.

The exhibition is in aid of Fortalice, a domestic abuse charity in Bolton.