Tides of Change at the Palace of Westminster

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Millicent Fawcett wrote of the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons that “one great discomfort of the grille was that the interstices of the heavy brass work were not large enough to allow the victims who sat behind it to focus.” She likened the experience to “using a gigantic pair of spectacles which did not fit.” In this comparison, Fawcett highlighted one of the great ironies of women’s participation in British political life. The “Ladies’ Gallery,” created in 1834 for a handful of well-connected women to view the proceedings of the House of Commons was, in fact, a glorified ventilation shaft. While allowing women limited access to the political proceedings of their country by giving them the power to view debates in the Commons, the Ladies’ Gallery was cramped, the sound did not carry and the view was restricted. The gallery grilles, these ‘giant spectacles’, restricted the women’s vision; figurative glasses inducing physical myopia. In ‘viewing’ these debates the women were spatially removed, relegated to the top corner of the chamber. They were placed behind grilles - behind bars - a subtle foretelling of what was to come. Their vision was further restricted by the semi-darkness of the gallery; their hearing by its muffled position. The Ladies’ Gallery thus represented a kind of all-female, political hinterland.

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During the 19th and early 20th centuries then, politically active women entered a twilight zone, both in the figurative and physical sense. One hundred years later, a work of art entitled ‘New Dawn’, celebrating women’s suffrage glows, resplendent in St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster. Mary Branson, the artist, is also the first person to win the accolade of having a work of contemporary art commissioned as a permanent installation within the Houses of Parliament.

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New Dawn, which measures over six metres high, is a playful twist on the stained glass window medium, and as an addition to the Gothic Victorian splendour of St Stephen’s Hall it is subtle in its contemporaneity. Yet, its identity is by no means palled by this fact. Conversely, it results that this work of art and all that it represents has a primordial quality about it; that it translates a sense of having always been and having always meant to have been there. The cleverness of Branson’s subtlety shows in the resulting permanency of her work and, subsequently, of the lives of each woman and man that struggled for women’s suffrage: the spirit of their struggle has, in fact, always belonged within these walls; through Branson’s work it becomes a reified presence.

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Combining layers of unambiguous symbolism, there is a simplicity to New Dawn that makes this installation powerfully universal. 168 hand-blown glass discs are set onto a steel and aluminium ‘portcullis’, mounted onto a green wall. Having spent part of her residency exploring the Parliamentary Archives, Branson’s discs reimagine the physical scrolls that sit on the shelves, which contain the Acts of Parliament ratifying women’s suffrage. The steel structure on which these discs are set take the form of an open portcullis; a progressive spin on the parliamentary coat of arms. The intersection of the metal bars of the portcullis underneath the circular glass plates creates rows upon rows of ‘female’ symbols. Yet the most interesting of Branson’s metaphors is undoubtedly her use of light. Women’s campaign for votes was often portrayed as an unstoppable wave sweeping society. In a reaffirmation of this fact, Branson has linked the lighting of her glass ‘scrolls’ to the tidal movement of the River Thames, which runs directly passed the hall. Both the colours and the luminosity of this installation are, therefore, never fixed; they rise and fall. They are both a celebration of women’s achievements and a reminder that there is much left to do.

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