EJ Major

In the series ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ the Suffragette movement provides a historical context for the performance and personal investigation of protest, a fixed vantage point from which to explore the myriad issues at play in contemporary society. I explored this with reference to the slashing of the Velázquez painting ‘The Rokeby Venus’ at The National Gallery, London by the Suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914. The event was used to examine my own confusion around notions of active citizenship, art-making and values, both economic and moral. In taking to the streets of London as a leaflet distributor and protestor dressed as a Suffragette prisoner, I was attempting to embody a sense of involvement, of actually ‘doing something’. My internal struggle is the counterpoint, represented in Contact Sheet II and the constructed colour images, a conflict also described by Mary Richardson in the exert from her autobiography ‘Laugh a Defiance’.

I work with both analogue and digital technologies to create photographic constructs that are, and are not what they seem. These pieces aim to challenge the veracity of the photographic portrait finding an authenticity in a notion of self-portraiture that involves acting. Referencing both historical events and characters individual works weave narratives between the past and the present while the use of archive images and text re-present a past in the present and ask us simply to look again.

Anna McNay wrote: “….through the deliberate coalescence of these early 20th century protests with those of more recent years, concerning such issues as climate change and welfare cuts, the photographs’ complex narratives place today’s protesters – Major’s audience, and Major herself, who appears in most of the shots, and attended the climate change march….– in amongst their ancestors, both lending weight to the contemporary issues, but also revitalising old battles.”