Liz Murray

My PhD research at the Royal College of Art nominates an historic act of gendered resistance – The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp – as artwork. Storytelling is intrinsic to this practice-led project as a method of engaging with feminist histories, narratives, events and artwork. It is an intersectional, ‘back-chatting’ methodology that folds elements of practice, history and politics for resharing as knowledge. I seek to test what the limits are for ‘art-work’ to generate a re-consideration of the queer practices, radical means and resistance that the Women’s Peace Camp established four decades ago. As a former Greenham Woman, I am employing an autoethnographic method that draws on stories, records, and materials from that time. These are manifested as ‘objects with stories’ or ‘storytelling objects’ that sit alongside the written part of my PhD research.

My artworks include sculpture, installation, photography and collage. I use transient, overlooked materials, undervalued craft techniques and DIY methods to examine how identities and events are framed, valued, and presented. My practice draws on feminist discourses and strategies of solidarity that have been overlooked or hidden and is informed by arts potential to form and operate resistantly. I often work collaboratively and am a member of the Partisan Social Club and London-based GLAP writing collective. I have recently co-authored the Anti-Fascist Newsletter for Five Years, published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.