The Exhibitions Hub Alumni Commission Award

Beyond These Walls There's Courage has been commissioned by Goldsmiths Exhibitions Hub and collaboratively supported by The Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths and Southwark Park Galleries.  

Tara White: Beyond These Walls There’s Courage

Goldsmiths Exhibitions Hub is proud to announce Beyond These Walls There’s Courage, an upcoming exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries. This commission tenderly maps the entangled dynamics between grief, intergenerational relationships, gender and protest. Operating in the overlaps between these frames of experience, Tara White uses the Anjili Ironwood Tree and Saffron Crocuses as botanical motifs to anchor their explorations of grief on both micro and macro scales.

Building on archival research conducted at The Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, Beyond These Walls There’s Courage examines everyday intricacies of performance, questioning how we might censor or distort our behaviours in public and private realms.

The emotional contours of grief are digested through speculative fictions, as Tara stresses the role of collectivity in both familial and activist environments. Moving fluidly between sculpture, photography, print and performance, this exhibition serves as an ode to overlooked elders who laid the foundation for the current Women Life Freedom uprisings, whilst Tara decidedly carves space for queer representation within this political sphere. 

Exhibition details 

Venue: Southwark Park Galleries, Lake Gallery 
Date: 9 - 24 September 2023
Visting hours:  Wednesday - Sunday at 11am - 5pm
Opening event: 8 September 5-7pm

Organiser and Partners

The project is curated and coordinated by the Exhibitions Hub (Goldsmiths, Department of Art) in partnership with the Women’s Art Library and Southwark Park Galleries.

The Exhibitions Hub in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College has been developed to support public-facing exhibitions held by students and alumni. The Exhibitions Hub is also developing partnerships and curatorial initiatives to connect research and practice at Goldsmiths with external venues and audiences. 

The Women's Art Library (WAL)

The Women’s Art Library collection is the research resource that began as a slide registry which became the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL) organized by a collective of women artists in the late 1970s.

By 1982, the WASL settled in Battersea Arts Centre, London and coordinated a programme of events and exhibitions while continuing to build the collection including photographic documentation, printed material, ephemera and later press cuttings.

Further to collecting documentation, the WASL set up a newsletter which eventually developed into Make, the magazine of women’s art. Another critical development was the establishment of the Black Women Artists Index, later called the Women of Colour Index.

The WAL thus acted as an alternative feminist space for self-identified artists to recognize, share and archive women’s art practices to study, publish and exhibit works. The WASL was renamed the Women’s Art Library (WAL) in the early 1990s and when the organization’s funding came to an end in 2002, marked by the final issue of Make magazine that year, the collection was gifted to Goldsmiths Library.

Dr Althea Greenan has worked with the WAL collection since 1990 and currently oversees a curatorial programme based on the WAL holdings to continue the resource’s enrichment through contemporary art practice.

Southwark Park Galleries

Southwark Park Galleries is an interdisciplinary arts organisation set across two distinctive venues – including a Grade II Listed deconsecrated church – and a garden in the heart of Southwark Park, London. Through our locally relevant and internationally significant programme of exhibitions, performances and public engagement, our mission is to connect people using the intersection of art, nature and culture to facilitate meaning and wellbeing across communities.

Established in 1984, we have a thriving reputation as a test site for experimental practice by commissioning artists at a critical stage to make their most ambitious work. Our public engagement and community work welcomes everyone. Our location means we can provide a rare civic offer of vital green and open cultural space for our park neighbours and beyond.

As we approach our 40th anniversary celebrations in 2024, we look forward to strengthening our local, national and international partnerships; amplifying our purpose of making creativity central in building a more engaged and inclusive society.

Southwark Park Galleries is the operating name of the Bermondsey Artists’ Group, a registered charity (no. 1073851) and member of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio of Organisations (NPO).

Image credits

• Banner image - 'Feminist Disco’ artwork, Rachael House from the ephemera collection relating to CREATE/feminisms Symposium Pop Quiz, (22 July 2014 Middlesex University) in the Women’s Art Library, Special Collections and Archives, Goldsmiths. Photo: David Ramkalowon
• Content image - Beyond These Walls There's Courage, Courtesy of Tara White, 2023