Learning about Hoda Shaarawi, the Egyptian feminist and nationalist leader

At the time, women in Egypt were confined to the house or harem. When in public, women were expected to show modesty by wearing the hijab over their hair and faces. Sha`arawi resented such restrictions on women's dress and movements, and started organizing lectures for women on topics of interest to them. This brought many women out of their homes and into public places for the first time. Sha`arawi even convinced them to help her establish a women's welfare society to raise money for the poor women of Egypt. In 1910, Sha`arawi opened a school for girls where she focused on teaching academic subjects rather than practical skills such as midwifery.
After World War I, many women took part in political actions against the British rule. In 1919, Sha`arawi helped organize the largest women's anti-British demonstration. In defiance of British orders to disperse, the women remained still for three hours in the hot sun.
Sha`arawi made a decision to stop wearing her veil in public after her husband's death in 1922. In 1923, Sha`arawi founded and became the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, after returning from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome she removed her face veil in public for the first time, a signal event in the history of Egyptian feminism. Women who came to greet her were shocked at first then broke into applause and some of them removed their veils.
Even as a young woman, she showed her independence by entering a department store in Alexandria to buy her own clothes instead of having them brought to her home. She helped to organize Mubarrat Muhammad Ali, a women's social service organization, in 1909 and the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914, the year in which she traveled to Europe for the first time. She helped lead the first women's street demonstration during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, and was elected president of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee.
She led Egyptian women pickets at the opening of Parliament in January 1924 and submitted a list of nationalist and feminist demands, which were ignored by the Wafdist government, whereupon she resigned from the Wafdist Women's Central Committee. She continued to lead the Egyptian Feminist Union until her death, publishing the feminist magazine l'Egyptienne (and el-Masreyya), and representing Egypt at women's congresses in Graz, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Marseilles, Istanbul, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Interlaken, and Geneva. She advocated peace and disarmament. Even if only some of her demands were met during her lifetime, she laid the groundwork for later gains by Egyptian women and remains the symbolic standard-bearer for their liberation movement.
Sha`arawi was involved in philanthropic projects throughout her life. In 1908, she created the first philanthropic society run by Egyptian women, offering social services for poor women and children. She argued that women-run social service projects were important for two reasons. First, by engaging in such projects, women would widen their horizons, acquire practical knowledge and direct their focus outward. Second, such projects would challenge the view that all women are creatures of pleasure and beings in need of protection. To Sha`arawi, problems of the poor were to be resolved through charitable activities of the rich, particularly through donations to education programs. Holding a somewhat romanticized view of poor women's lives, she viewed them as passive recipients of social services, not to be consulted about priorities or goals. The rich, in turn, were the "guardians and protectors of the nation."
Text found on Wikipedia

Photos by William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) was a British inventor and photography pioneer who invented the calotype process, a precursor to photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Talbot was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. Additionally, he made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.

Cécile Tarel sculptures

Née en 1946 dans la Sarthe. Commence à sculpter l'argile dès l'âge de 14 ans. Elève du sculpteur Pikko Nikolitch et élève au Conservatoire d'Art Plastique de Fresnes. Participe depuis 1979 à de nombreuses expositions personnelles et collectives : Salon d'Automne, Artistes Français, Indépendants... Obtient de nombreux prix et récompenses.

"Les femmes de TAREL sont une véritable poésie, un hymne à une féminité intemporelle et généreuse. Hiératiques mais douces, aux formes pleines et apaisantes, ces figures tout à la fois classiques et primitives, sensuelles et réservées font songer aux Korès archaïques, à Picasso (gravures de 1930, l'artiste et son modèle), par le traitement des masses. Bref, une très belle oeuvre, heureuse synthèse d'antiquité et de modernité." Florence Bellet-Ferte

Ursula von Rydingsvard coming to Yorkshire

I read the following article by Caroline Roux in the FT this past weekend and I'm longing to discover both the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Yorkshire and Ursula von Rydingsvard's sculptures.

Ursula von Rydingsvard is almost as little-known in Britain as she is celebrated in the US. There, her enormous art works, created out of hundreds of glued and sculpted cedar planks, are dotted throughout the country - in the collections of the Met and MoMA in New York; in the generous grounds of Microsoft's original HQ in Redmond, Washington; and in such private hands as those of collector Steve Oliver in Sonoma...
Next month, however, a major show of her work comes to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a rolling estate of 500 landscaped acres in northern England that already houses an array of important outdoor works...

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, from April 5
ysp.co.uk

Claudia Leisinger and her beautiful travel photos

Claudia Leisinger takes us to Brazil, Sicily and Bhutan.

Currently based in London, Claudia spent her early childhood in India and Bhutan, before returning to Switzerland in 1980. She finished the MA course in Photojournalism at the London College of Communication in December 2007 with "The Changes Within: Bhutan Between Monarchy and Democracy" a story which documented Bhutan's shift towards its first-ever democratic elections. This was published in the NZZ (Neue Zuercher Zeitung).

At present she works as freelance portrait and documentary photographer. She has had her photos published in the Guardian, the Telegraph Magazine, the Big Issue, the NZZ newspaper and the Foto8 website, amongst others.

She is available for reportage, documentary and portrait work.

You can contact her on +44(0) 7768547700 or photo@claudialeisinger.com

Elisabeth Frink and horses

English sculptor and printmaker. She studied at the Guildford School of Art (1946–9) and with Bernard Meadows at the Chelsea School of Art (1949–53). She was linked with the post-war school of British sculptors, including Reg Butler, Bernard Meadows and Eduardo Paolozzi, though her work is distinguished by her commitment to naturalistic forms and themes. Frink's range of subjects included men, birds, dogs, horses and religious motifs. Bird (1952; London, Tate), with its alert, menacing stance, characterizes her early work. She concentrated on bronze outdoor sculpture with a scarred surface created by repeatedly coating an armature with wet plaster; each coating is distressed and broken, eliminating detail and generalising form. In the 1960s Frink's continuing fascination with flight was evident in a series of falling figures and winged men. While living in France from 1967 to 1970, she began a series of threatening, monumental, goggled male heads. On returning to England, she focused on the male nude, barrel-chested, with mask-like features, attenuated limbs and a pitted surface, for example Running Man (1976; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.). Frink's sculpture, and her lithographs and etchings created as book illustrations, drew on archetypes expressing masculine strength, struggle and aggression.