Idle Women is an arts, environment and social justice collaboration founded by artists in 2015 |
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Idle Women create artworks which are spaces: a boat, a garden, a rave, a website.
Our works are sculptural, site-specific and contextual. They are created through social justice collaborations and built to last, to be animated and inhabited by women. Our projects reach for something beyond the horizon, creating transformative spaces for women that can't be cut, closed or taken away. Our first endeavour was to build and tour NB Selina Cooper with women living in a specialist domestic violence refuge. Touring this boat along the canals of the North West affirmed to us the extent to which women's access and safety is always precarious and how fundamentally intertwined the roots of violence against women and the environment are. We are building The Physic Garden which is situated alongside the canal on a permanent site owned by Idle Women and Humraaz Support Services in Nelson, Lancashire. This garden is the first of its kind hand built by women, for women. The Physic Garden Network is a new digital project - a website rooted in the garden. Helen was a three year process of deconstruction and reconstruction with women in St Helens who wanted to tear the house apart and concluded with Power Tools - a DIY film series for youtube. Our forthcoming work Petrichor / A Case for Land is a performative argument generated by the gaps in broken concrete, voicing women's rightful place to belong through the urgency of lost years. Idle Women is a collaboration with women from any and all walks of life. We work to our strengths because we know that transformation is a daily process, there are always other ways and beauty is complicated. |