ADELE
PATRICK

Reflection: 19th April 2024

connections, commitment, campaigns, courage, solidarity

I have felt joy and hope this week in the face of roiling international tumult and conflict and uncertainties, loss and sadness closer to home - derived from the strengthening of ties between people doing great work creatively and with equality foregrounded here in Glasgow, nationally and across the world. It was humbling as well as enlightening and productive to be meeting with representatives from the Kurdish Women’s Library.  @kadineserleri This project was initiated by academic and journalist Nagihan Akarsel, a member of the Jineoloji Research Center and editor of Jineoloji Journal, who was assassinated on 4 October 2022 in Sulaymaniya. This, the ultimate cost paid for the courage required for hatching, (or running) an equalities rooted cultural organisation. I have been drawn towards brining together some thinking and actions around the hidden collateral for intersectional working on the network of people sustaining and developing countercultural organisations in the face of structural inequalities and Nagihan’s fate has galvanised my commitment. In the meantime, myself and many of my Glasgow Women’s Library colleagues who gathered to meet our Kurdish counterpart are looking forward to a long term connection.
I frequently refer to the absolute cruciality for me of this idea of constellations of support and solidarity. Amongst the inspiring people in the firmament is Jackie Kay.  There are so many connective tissues between Jackie, her work, and other remarkable feminists activists and creatives in our community and to GWL. Jackie’s support of us and our work stretches back over 3 decades. In June 2021, Ingrid Pollard the brilliant artist whose activism and art can be seen in our collections had completed a residency and was launching her own show, No Cover Up (a body of work inspired by our collections of activism by women of colour antiracist campaigners, lesbians and feminists) as part of the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art. Jackie had been invited by Ingrid to preview the works…it was thrilling and humbling to see Jackie and Ingrid touring the works, hearing the voices of some of the campaigners that Ingrid had embedded in aural works across the library shelves and knowing that we had two formidable women creatives whose lives had been spent engaged in different forms of resistance, creativity and protest in our midst. When ArtUk approached GWL to say that they would fund a writer to create a new work inspired by art in our collection for our 30th birthday we did not hesitate. Jackie created the remarkable work A life in protest that now features in this brilliant new collection.

Reflection: 12th April 2024

para academics, crafting, conversations, libraries, archives

This week’s ‘in conversation’ event with Becky Male was an uplifting experience. It’s the first RSE collaboration I have been involved with (notwithstanding the film produced by them of introducing some of the gems in the Glasgow Women’s Library) and it was great to be talking together as ‘para academics’ surrounded by jumpers, knitting patterns and copies of ‘Golden Hands’ about the feminist and counter cultural power of textiles and crafting.  A source that features in both Becky’s blogs and feminist crafting adventures and my own PhD is this knitting pattern in Spare Rib…


Knit Yourself a Women’s Wooly, Spare Rib, issue 114, 1982

The pattern and Becky’s fashioning and re-fashioning of this piece was a thematic thread in our session: Crafting change: understanding the radical threads of women’s creative industries at Glasgow Women’s Library.
We covered some of the ground of women experience complex relationships with the creative industries, as makers, crafters, and curators. Women have been shapers of material and craft culture but are still largely eclipsed and less well-paid, and where persistently the areas where they have traditionally led are still often seen as the ‘lesser arts.’ I was aware of this form of cultural injustice rooted in misogyny when I embarked on my first degree in Embroidered and Woven Textiles in the mid 1980’s, it was one of the ways my feminism was forged. Becky used some powerful examples of where feminism has, for over half a century, grappled with what a counter-cultural, women-centred response to creativity and crafting might look like, steadily manifesting a fascinating, overlooked strand of creative industry.
The subsequent session in the RSE Investigates series was about the future and agency of libraries and it is great to see so many public, creative and strategic thinking and discussion taking place on this topic. I'm excited to be participating soon in one of a range of consultation sessions about the future of the National Library of Scotland and that I am involved in the planning stages of a week of activity with Art School Plus, on a new project that is partnering with the Hackney libraries. This programme will explore the ways that artists’ agency can provide ways for library materials, spaces and resources to be made relevant, accessible and owned by specific communities.
During the week there were several opportunities to talk, albeit remotely, to international colleagues who are either sustaining long running women's and feminist libraries and archives or incubating new ones. I reconnected with new colleagues in Tirana and colleagues in Istanbul, including  https://kadineserleri.org/aabout-us/The Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation (WLICF).  I had first connected with WLICF on my first unforgettable visit to Istanbul some 10 years ago and it is so cheering to know that we GWL and their library resource have survived all that has occurred during the past decade. Through connections with another Turkish colleague I heard about the Cambridge based @revolutionarypapers https://revolutionarypapers.org/ and from there the wonderful Archivists Against History Repeating Itself https://www.archivistsagainst.org/about-us/
I'm really looking forward to the ways that these and other interenational and national connections are going to build and develop over the weeks, months and years and how this incredible burgeoning of passion and commitment to making and sustaining libraries is alive here and across the world.

Reflection: 5th April 2024

feminism, art, activism, class, creativity, fashioning

After the calm and being enveloped and invigorated by nature in Perthshire I was thrown back into the rain of the central belt and a tourist thronged Edinburgh. I was keen to not miss a talk (and then the treat of a large dinner gathering) in the company of the artist, Martha Rosler. I've been inspired by Rosler’s hugely influential and prescient work since I was a young woman. I trace her influence on me back to the mid-eighties when Rachel Harris, one of the coordinators of Castlemilk Womanhouse came back from a study trip to America having encountered Judy Chicago and Rosler and brought back the gift of a book of Rosler’s Positions in the Life World a publication that accompanied her first retrospective in 1999 at New Museum New York.



At that time, when I was desperate to find socially engaged artists who unequivocally incorporated feminism in their practice, she joined my personal pantheon of legendary feminist thinkers, activists and creatives, her work, a vital touchstone. Rosler’s talk was a jaw-dropping canter through a truly astonishing volume of 50 years of complex works produced in response to an array of international contexts with Rosler collaborating with a vast array of people and groups. It was more than apparent that she has been doing this, not in anticipation of an (art) audience, but powered from the activism and need to confront injustices at the heart of her practice. I'm now really looking forward to reading in her new book, Culture Class I so appreciate that Kirsten Lloyd of @edinburghcollegeofart made this visit possible and her ongoing commitment to understanding and articulating Rosler’s practice and connecting Rosler to audiences in Scotland. https://www.gender.ed.ac.uk/blog/2024/martha-rosler-edinburgh-college-art
Amongst the other things this week that have been bringing me joy (and I say this with the full acknowledgement that the ongoing war is going through further convulsions of appalling horror, preoccupying the thoughts of anyone who has a heart...) are gentle, nourishing, inspiring conversations with many users, volunteers and staff at Glasgow Women’s Library and specifically discussing with volunteer GWL volunteer, Becky Male the terrain of art, creativity, women crafting. I have loved reading a series of Becky's blogs on this topic and Becky and I will be ‘in conversation’ for a GWL/RSE discussion, bringing some counter cultural perspective to a new RSE Investigates programme. This will be an opportunity to share a little of my thinking on women, feminism, class and fashioning that was seeded in my PhD research from 20 years ago.
And finally I have been a fan of the work of Media Coop for years and am noting that they are reaching their 20 year anniversary. I really admire the ways that Louise and Lucinda have quietly developed a hugely impactful, truly values led cooperative enterprise and wanted to ake this moment to recommend watching their films, animations and checking out their website.

Reflection: 29th March 2024

writing, walking, swimming, snow, sunshine, nature, views, breath, joy



The Long View, Ben Lawyers.

I am just back from a self-organised, writing, walking and restorative retreat week in Perthshire. It did what I needed it to do. It was an opportunity to really focus on the manuscript that I've been working on, to read, to discover awesome new sights and places in sunshine and snow and to be able to swim (and take saunas by the banks of) Loch Tay. Some days it was warm enough for me to work on a balcony, writing outdoors is one of my favourite sensations; to be creating in the company of squirrels, birdlife, green and trees in abundance and the sounds of nature, breathing and thinking deeply. I love Perthshire and particularly the view from up high of the full length of magnificent Glen Lyon. Each visit I make I try to build in a little pilgrimage to the Yew at Fortingall; 5000 years old and this year, and happily I can report that it is looking almost immodestly green, like it was gleefully embracing the return of spring.
On Tuesday, sitting in the sun glancing out to a still Loch with birdsong all around, I participated in the last three hour training session of the Convergence Failitation course and despite the deeply complex and challenging content and the logistical difficulties that corralling so may participants might have presented it was concluded wholly productively and positively. I really appreciated the care that had gone into the development and delivery of the course and to be able to work with over 100 people from across the world all invested in this nonviolent communicative facilitation process. I felt like I managed to gently edge my manuscript forward and appreciate that I am now nearing the end of this phase, the work involved in drafting the whole documents is within my grasp. The last couple of chapters have been really tough going but process feels meaningful and satisfying and still feels like it is speaking to the daily issues I am addressing in my work with people and groups and the cultural context and time I am working in.
Bookended by the frenetic and challenging world of work this break was calm and inspiring with so many instances of joy packed into a few days. I took delight in unexpected second hand book store finds in Aberfeldy, the spectacle of the Falls of Killin (a beauty spot beloved on my grandparents and therefore summoning up happy memories of them), soaked in the glories of the Hot Box, Kenmore and paused to gasp at the sheer beauty along the Edramucky Trail at the foot of Ben Lawers with rushing, icy water, verdant nature, ancient stones and the backdrop of snow-capped hills.

Reflection: 22nd March 2024

conviction, vision, relevance, facilitation, healing, power, actions, de-escalation, agreement, mediation


Jayaben Desai, leader of the strike at Grunwick photo processing lab, Willesden, 1976, photo by Sheila Gray.

I am still processing the impact of encountering the volume of impactful art work by women, and specifically women elders encountered in London last week and feeling excited about being able to revisit  some of the works in Scotland later this year. The Women in Revolt! show will tour to Edinburgh and I am thrilled that I will have the opportunity to be in conversation with the curator, Linsey Young at an event @natgalleriesco in May. This exhibition in its incorporation of over 100 artists working in the 1970s and 1980s and with rich contextualising material goes a long way in addressing the virtual erasure of this significant canon of feminist counter cultural production. 
For many years I had harboured hopes that we might show works by Yoko Ono @womenslibrary and somewhat to my astonishment this will now happen as part of our contribution to the @GIfestival in June. Experiencing Yoko Ono:Music of the Mind @Tate is an unequivocal demonstration of the perennial and perpetual timeliness of her creative message and the relevance of her conviction, expressed throughout her art and activism over the decades that Peace is Power. The incorporation of one of Ono’s wish trees in our new garden will encourage and welcome reflection and the articulations of much needed new visions of the future. The iteration we will stage of Arising, will be an acknowledgement of the need for spaces to share the reality of experiences of harm perpetrated on the women of the world. This work and new garden making and performance works by Reiko Goto Collins will allow for an array of meaningful engagements throughout the festival at GWL, speaking to the need for deep healing spaces and places that encompass nature and for peaceful and powerful thoughts and actions.

Detail, Wish Trees, Yoko Ono, Tate Modern, 2024

I’m now half way through the intense Convergence Facilitation training programme…it has been revelatory and I am anticipating all the ways that this could be useful not just for my work @womenslibrary but in my support of other organisations and groups. Since the approach is about how one can hold the space for people who have opposing views on ways forward I can see how it has potential for expanded use as so many more lives are being lived atomised, embattled and in conflict. As the landscape of relational dynamics becomes more febrile I want to actively focus my attention on the ways I can support descalation,  support facilitated and effective discussion and mediate. Convergence Facilitation talks about how we might seek out the points of ‘noncontroversial essence’ amongst groups that disagree. I want and need to be able to sit even more comfortably between factions that have opposing views and it has been helpful to discover this new tool for doing just this.
So far this year I have had the good fortune to create new and strong links with colleagues and feminist leaders working in Istanbul, Dublin, Belfast and Albania. This week it was lovely to meet with Yoko Narisada, a Professor of Social Anthropology at Okinawa University who has been researching the operations, strategy and modes of feminist governance at work @womenslibrary. I am looking forward to hearing how this research supports Yoko’s ambitions to develop a new women’s library resource in Japan and to strengthening the connective tissues between our work.

Reflection: 17th March 2024

art, elders, feminism, revolt, erasures, relevance, recognition, engagement, peace, power

I am currently in London and have taken the opportunity, over the past couple of days to spend concentrated time with some amazing art (something of a luxury of late). I caught the Women and Revolt! exhibition curated by Linsey Smith @Tate. There is so much to say, and no doubt I’ll share a lot more from my own perspective about this exhibition when it arrives @natgalleriessco in Edinburgh later in the year but just to note that my visit evoked in me a range of emotions. I felt overwhelming joy at the wealth of work that has been incorporated with so much contextualising material culture, excitement at seeing so much work in real life that had been the bedrock of my teaching of Gender, Art and Culture teaching materials through the 1900s and early 2000s @glasgowschoolart, from Lesley Sandeson to Tessa Boffin, @jillposener to Jo Spence. It was thrilling  to see these and so many other brilliant iconic works including several by Marlene Smith that I had recently had the good fortune to hear the artists speak about at a @sofa_fridays event at GSA. I felt so incredibly lucky as I walked through the galleries to have encountered, met and worked with so many of the artists that have been included from Shirley Cameron to @lindersterling, from Ingrid Pollard to @chilaburman, @ainsleysam to @keeganrita and I felt proud to see so many publications and materials from @womenslibrary collection incorporated into the illuminating vitrines and accompanying displays.  I was thrown by the striking the difference in the experience of walking around this specific @Tate show. Unlike regular exhibitions where artists are characteristically experienced as at a remove from their audiences (myself included) I found I was not the only one feeling personally connected to the works and makers and records of revolt being shown here. I was continually overhearing groups and pairs of attendees sharing memories evoked by images and records of demonstrations, or reminscences about having been involved in collective endeavours that linked directly to the work. This was a unique experience for me in a mainstream museum; to witness this degree of meaningful connection, of shared experiences promoted by the images and works displayed and the audiences engaging with them, of relevance and recognition. 

Rabbits- the pregnant Bunny Girl and women as animal,  Shirley Cameron, 1974. 

I experienced degrees of sadness and of anger; this was an expansive show with over 100 artists featured but in terms of space could have taken over the whole building or be seen across Tate Modern and Tate Britain simulataneously. The galleries were absolutely mobbed. It reminded me of how astonished the ‘city fathers’ had been at the barnstorming success of the Glasgow Girls exhibition in 1990 when Glasgow as European City of Culture. It was a phenomenal sell out, requiring a further iteration in Kelvingrove after the first exhibition at GSA and without doubt the most popular exhibition during a landmark year in Glasgow’s reinvention. But still there is prevailing idea what a blockbuster show is and it is not work that centres creatives who were or who have been slighted or ignored by the mainstream. (I know this is arguably changing as @KylaMc.Donald has eloquently mapped in her work researching the turn towards the ‘recovery’ of women artists…) I was continually struck by the elephant in the Women in Revolt! gallery spaces, the lack of an explanation for the public who may need to be made aware of why the works were so very often there ‘courtesy of the artist’ or from the artists’ own collection, and where the explanation was from Tate about the virtual absence of this alternative contemporary canon in the Tate collection. Finally, I found myself having sober thoughts about the artists (featured or not included in Women in Revolt!) who had not managed to sustain in their practice, who died without recognition or who may have had this moment in the spotlight, but will still be finding it difficult to survive or thrive because of the discriminations that have prevailed within the art industry and establishment. So this was for me a celebration tinged with the sobering reality of the ongoing and historic erasures and marginalisations.

Untitled (OurL eader) Barbara Kruger, 1986 

Other arresting and enjoyable shows on this visit (by yet more formidable, feminist elders) were Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine and @YokoOno @Tate. Surely Kruger’s current show must be one of the most hard-hitting, eloquent, unequivocal and visually dazzling indictments of American right wing populism and the culpability of big tech, social media corporations? It was a uplifting to witness at scale and dexterously and digitally animated, the power of Kruger’s characteristic caustic, excoriating critique of the arch gaslighters and manipulators.
I was moved to tears at Yoko Ono:Music of the Mind. What an astonishing prescient oeuvre and how influential and fresh the early works are.  I was born in 1961 and remember the levels of demonization and ridicule of Ono as a young person living through the period of the Beatles meltdown, and the way Ono’s own creative life was erased or ridiculed in the press whilst she was subjected to racist and sexist misrepresentations. This show demonstrates her brilliance, wit, creative courage and the capacity of her works (some first made some sixty years and more ago) notably her ‘instruction pieces’ to litrally and powerfully engage. I have rarely seen so many people so actively involved in (re) ‘making’ works in a retrospective exhibition of this kind or – including children and adults demonstrating the sheer enduring power of Ono’s Bag Piece (first performed in 1964) and the sheer hope fuelling spectacle of Add Colour (Refugee Boat) conceived first in 1960 and made beautifully and profoundly manifest by thousands of people in 2024 (detail below).

Reflection: 10th March 2024

ethics, working, community, illumination, spring, renewal, protection, abundance, seeding

The day after arriving back from Istanbul, I was very sad to have to say goodbye to @louisewhiteperformance who has been based at @womenslibrary for her @CloreLeadership Fellowship secondment throughout February. Having been able to learn more about Louise’s approaches to working and her visions for the future, I am extremely excited to see what she is going to give rise to next in Dublin. It was such a wonderful gift to me to have Louise generously open up questions around leadership and ethical approaches to working that were relevant to myself and the wider team. Louise is endeavouring to  make (further) work in values led ways that centres and creates community. She had arrived auspiciously on The Feast of (the solar goddess) Brigid, also known as Imbolc. She brought with her a beautiful Brídeóg ('little Brigid') made from reeds and clad in cloth, and we placed her in the centre of the Library. One of the most powerful Celtic goddesses, Brigid was said to be born with a flame, or rays of sunlight, on her head. She is connected with spring and the chasing away of winter and is variously referred to as the goddess of illumination, fire, renewal and creativity. I like to think she has brought much needed blessings, protection, good fortune and abundance to the GWL kin while she has been residing over us and all who have visited. She will stay in situ for the forthcoming year. One of Louise’s beautiful parting gifts were equally touching they included packets of @Pithsupply seeds. As these grow they will symbolise my hopes for Louise and her company and for myself in our shared endeavours for seeding, growth and rooting of good things in our respective work lives this forthcoming year.



There were more welcome gifts delivered this week. Notably, a copy of the Embers hand book (downloadable here that @wheelerkat has produced. I had been delighted to make a small contribution to this helpful toolkit and appreciate the work that Kat is undertaking to support groups and individuals who are active, or wanting to be active in bringing about positive change in the places they live. Yesterday was a busy, and at many points beautiful International Women's Day. There are many events and things to attend to during IWD @womenslibrary (we are active celebrating women’s acheievements all year round but there is a surge of ‘asks’ each year from organisations, press and others to mark this ‘theme’). This year I enjoyed participating in celebrations and programmes at GWL and other settings at a reasonable pace; it was so wonderful to spend time in the new garden that Reiko Goto Collins is developing for GWL for @gifestival and beyond (literally watch this space) and to meet Jenny Matthews (@jennymphoto) who has a wonderful show currently at @streetlevelphotoworks. Amina Shah, National Librarian and CEO of the National Library of Scotland and I had been invited to introduce a wonderful day of online programming by @glasgowgallerina of @cilip_scotland part of her excellent #Winspiration (feminism for libraries and librarians) initiative. The content was rich and uplifting and worthwhile diving into on YouTube if you missed it.
This past week I also embarked on a new, really fascinating learning journey. I am part of an online cohort being trained on Covergent Facilitation, a non violent communication rooted approach to working with groups of people. It is a method that I think is going to be really helpful in my coaching and other facilitation and training contexts into the future. And finally, I was really touched to receive, completely out of the blue, my own diary from 1976. Someone I had lost touch with had spotted on my website that I feature and have written about my old diaries and notebooks and had thoughtfully contacted to me to say they had this diary and asked if I wanted it returned. Opening some of the pages has heralded an unexpected delving into my past self...to be continued!

Reflection: 4th March 2024

connecting, vitality, discovery, eldership, creativity, kindness, energy

Street artworks omnipresent in Istanbul.

I'm going to try and condense my impressions and thoughts about an intense, wonderful trip to Istanbul this past week.  I had the opportunity to reconnect with writer, curator, queer and feminist leader and editor, Seçil Epik (@epikse) and get to know a host of amazing creatives, curators, women's and feminist and queer leaders. These are people who are keeping expansive, accessible and inclusive productions, publications and programming alive in a context is both remarkably vibrant but that has its all too evident challenges. It was great to hear more about the work that Seçil and her colleague Büşra Mutlu have been undertaking through their publishing venture @UmamiKitap and to get a better impression of how feminist and queer spaces are being often spontaneously conjured (for example, through the Queer Waves parties). We were able to encounter a host of filmakers, writers, performers and musicians during the WoW festival Istanbul. Amongst the contibutors were really inspiring colleagues from Havle (@havlekadin) a Muslim women's resource initiative who are engaged in sustaining intersectional forums for women and are involved in ground breaking research, placing centre stage the complexity of lived experiences of Muslim women in Istanbul. Their work provides a vital impression of a community that defies lazy reductionism or propagandist ideas about for example, the ideal or ‘normal’ Muslim wife, woman or family. I am proud we now have a selection of their publications added to the @womenslibrary collection.
Luckily my visit coincided with the launch of a brilliant exhibition at the @Peramuzesi and I had the chance to meet curator @Ulyas who is undertaking and commissioning some stunning work. The exhibition Souvenirs of the Future is brilliantly conceived and displayed.


Remarkable works and vitrines on show at the Pera Museum as part of the Souvenirs of the Future exhibition.

It was a real joy to be introduced by Seçil to Ruth McCarthy (@ruth.ellen.mccarthy) who I shared a platform with alongside Seçil in the final day of the WoW festival. This was a great opportunity to find out more about Ruth’s artistic directorship and founding of @outburstqueerarts and the amazing body of work that it has generated but also to share ideas, visions and thoughts about lesbian eldership.  I'm hoping that this might be a conversation that can be developed into the future. Ruth and Seçil had collaborated in order to bring a remarkable, memorable and moving performance by @raphael_khouri, IT WAS PARADISE, UNFORTUNATELY (No such thing as theatre) to Istanbul. It was unforgettable to experience this work in the packed auditorium of the Pera Museum along with a rapt audience.


Ruth, Seçil and I speaking on the final day of WoW Istanbul, caught by writer Asli Tohumcu.

On the final day of my visit I managed to build in a tour of Kiraathane (@kiraathane24), the first literature house in Istanbul, a wonderful space that launched in October 2018 and is something of a hidden gem for writers and readers in the heart of the city. Kiraathane was conceived as a space for literature lovers to come together to discuss writing and rights, arts and current affairs. It functions as a “free word center”, critical as threats to freedom of expression in Istanbul and across the world need to be vigilantly resisted. It was a delight to have been invited to Kiraathane by one of the organisation’s team @AsliTohumcu, who had delivered a hugely well received talk about her development as a writer at WoW and who I am happy to hear will be visiting the Edinburgh International Book Festival later this year. So, an amazing trip full of new connections, a chance to see some wonderful new works and an opportunity to reflect on the connective tissues between feminist projects. The drive to make intersectional feminist spaces and create programmes of creative work is evident and alive in Istanbul, in Belfast (where Ruth is based) and in Glasgow, but being surrounded by this energy reminded me that all over the world there are remarkable people doing wonderful, life affirming creative work, and that we have shared concerns about the infringements on our human rights, around censorship and forms of personal and creative oppression. My abiding memory will be of the kindness of Seçil, being introduced to her amazing network of creatives and the opportunity to see things, meet people and feel radically welcomed.  

Detail of work, New Orientation by Gülsün Karamustafa, first exhibited in a warehouse in Tophane, Istanbul next to the Bosphorus which had been used between 1950 and 1990 by merchant vessels for loading and unloading. The artist’s focus is sex workers working at the Galata brothel that dates back to Genoese times and their encounters with sailors. She is drawing attention to the women who have gone missing in Istanbul in the past two years. The ribbons used are stamped with the names of the missing women and the dates when they were last seen.

Reflection: 24th February 2024

enriching, seeing, hearing, reading, appreciation,

I feel like my week has been hugely enriched by reading things, seeing things, hearing things and new creative discoveries. I wanted to spend a moment in appreciation of the ways that people have had the  generosity and belief over more than three decades in the idea of a woman's library in Glasgow. The building, the collection, the staff cohort, the governance, the volunteers, the programmes, the digital life of GWL constitutes a manifestation of a form of collective imagination and visioning. This is a phenomenon that has accumulated and accreted through labour, love, and things shared with the thought of benefitting others and making change. One of my own first champions and someone who has supported GWL from the outset is artists and educator, @ainsleysam. It is touching that just as her lifelong contribution to feminist art praxis is getting more fully recognised (as is evident in her wonderful show at GOMA) that Sam’s support of me and of the organisation is still in flow.
Recently I discovered an encouraging, kind postcard Sam sent to me from Australia during the lead in to Women in Profile festival in 1990 Some thirty four years later I spotted Sam’s distinctive handwriting on a package awaiting me on my desk with another beautiful postcard and donation to GWL enclosed.
Another uplifting donation sent to me this week came in the form of an exquisite catalogue. I love beautiful records of memorable exhibitions and especially those that are more than lush documentation of works but add a further dimension to the real life experience. I had really wanted to retain my memory a beautiful show, Fine Toothed Comb curated by @lubainapics and featuring her work and that of @magda_stawarska, @tchill80 and @rebeccachesneyartist vividly in my mind and receiving this beautiful publication, donated to GWL, allows me and others accessing the recently upgraded new arts shelving in the Library to (re)inhabit the incredible spaces created at the venue @Homemcr and to reimagine the soundscape.
I am thinking a lot about this longitudinal creative act, of bringing a locus of things into being and the ways that making a space allows for these crossings and weavings of creative and cultural contributions, ideas and work across the world. The whole can be seen having the effect, as I witness daily of instances of rapt engagement, moments of joy and inspiration offering a life enhancing, visionary and vital fabric of ideas and objects that is auguring change; a new form of legacy, a new form of heritage.


Catalogue, A Fine Toothed Comb.


This sense of a matrix of affecting making was in my mind as I watched a screening at GWL this past week of ground breaking filmwork recently restored by @cinenovadistribution works including Jacqui Duckworth’s A Prayer Before Birth. Cinenova was one of the inspirational early feminist collecting projects that I so vividly remember providing a model for those of us incubating GWL; we knew they were working away, gathering and collecting film works by women alongside sister organisations in Europe notably Kunstlerinnenarchiv and Bildweschel. They influenced and inspired us, giving us vital exemplars and the confidence to stay afloat and vision the future. Having models is critical at an early stage of creating new spaces so it was moving all these decades on to see the beautifully and lovingly restored works being shown in the wonderful space of GWL to a packed audience. Duckworth was in the roster of artists that I was introducing students to when I was still teaching at Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her films were largely unknown at that time in Scotland and it is astonishing to see the appetite and interest amongst people of all ages for these pre-digital works. At the end of the week I enjoyed catching Helena Reckitt (talking alongside voice notes provided by Gaby Moser) on the theme, Against structurelessness the resonances of 70s and 80s feminism's on current collective work. Helena is another stalwart feminist thinker, educator and curator that I continual learn from. This wonderfully rich talk asked questions inspired by the work that Helena co-leads by the @feministduration reading group. I had the good great good fortune to be asked to contribute to one of the many sessions this group convened during my Clore Leadership Fellowship. Helena has been working with another feminist group co-convened by Gaby Moser, Emilia Amalia and it was fascinating to hear more about their experiences in their efforts to create new spaces for support, discussion, deep listening and shared reading. One of the very many provocative and productive insights shared was the need to sit with the challenges that conflicted and dissonant aspects of feminism present; to be vigilant against the idea of ‘feminist forgetting’. I was struck with the relevance of this idea in today’s contested terrain of feminism; the reality and the mythmaking around solidarity and sisterhood in feminism alongside an acknowledgement of ambivalences, anger and schisms within the movement. Thinking about the long arc of feminist making, thinking, organising and discussion (evidenced in much of the work that has moved me this week) I am struck by how incredibly generative, reflexive and open to change feminism has had to be in order to survive and thrive. Much of it is, of course, abundantly and gloriously in evidence in the GWL collection.

Reflection 17th February 2024

wisdom, art, makers, critical friendship, energy, reflection, coaction, discovery

I wanted to recording some of the highlights of this week; they include attending one of the quite amazing, long running, free @sofa_Fridays events at Glasgow School of Art. I was privileged to participate in one of these events in conversation with Ingrid Pollard last year and on Friday, it was thrilling to be in the audience and be entranced by hearing and seeing Marlene Smith, surely one of the great icons of British art, speaking, humbly and with huge perception and erudition about not just art making but art appreciation. There was so many profound aspects to the event and the quality of the Q&A, led by students was illuminating. I loved Smith’s response to the question of form over feeling in the making of art. She was unequivocal about the need, for her as a maker and consumer of art that feelings come first, and thinking follows in the conception and reception of art. I would recommend anyone who wants to get a better idea of the importance of Smith’s early work and that of the Black Art Movement of the 1980s of which Marlene was a key contributor  to visit the Black Art Research project website.
I have really enjoyed having a peer leader travelling alongside me over this last couple of weeks. @louisewhiteperformance is a theatre maker, someone committed to community making and creative discovery and has been taking a sabbatical at Glasgow Women’s Library  as a current Clore Leadership Fellow. I have found it really wonderful to have a colleague here to reflect back what they understand to be leadership at work at GWL and to have another welcome dose of informed critical friendship. I've been making dogged progress on my manuscript, dogged because the challenges significant just now making sustaining creative practice difficult. Having a focussed and free mind can be hard when you are feeling either under siege or your energies are diverted by negative ‘ambushing’ of all kinds. My momentum has been sustained through knowing that the things that I'm experiencing are the very things that I need to be writing about. As ever, I have really appreciated working shoulder to shoulder with the support of two equally dogged (and challenged!) critical friends, making their own headway in their own creative and writing journeys. Reading the work of others who have processed challenge into useful reflection for the benefit of others is also so inspirational. I read an excellent chapter by in a book that's new to me this week around feminist leadership, by Karen Suyamoto and Mary Ballou who introduced the concept of ‘coacted’ work that addresses race, class and gender. I have also finally become a member of the @societyofauthors and I am looking forward to discovering this year more about how to access support from this network for my independent writing practice.

Reflection 10th February 2024

courage, non-violence, dialogic, curiosity, hope, solidarity, support, compassion, understanding

It's Saturday the 10th of February and I've been ill for the last week or so with a lost voice (how telling!). Illness is not the best time to have to work through significant challenges like those I have been encountering of late. Trying to make any type of headway is always made more possible through knowing you are in a network of support. I am galvanised, now as at other times of conflict and stress (and there have been many!) by thinking about the ways that others have overcome obstacles in the trajectory of progressive movement change. Fortunately, working in Glasgow Women’s Library I have been witness to the steady remarkable massing of evidence on hundreds of shelves of people who have overcome against the odds. I work in a place where I am continually surrounded by examples of courage in abundance, of people living and past who have endured with grace, fuelled by a vision of what a just future might look like and messages such could be found in the current Pouring In, Pouring Out exhibition lead by artist Ailie Rutherford. More information about this remarkable body of work can be found here (https://womenslibrary.org.uk/gwl_wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/POURING_OUT_POURING_IN.pdf) These are the models of bravery we have as intersectional feminists and those committed to non-violent communication and addressing abuses of power. At my shoulder is the power of deep lasting and new friendships and family love. I have been grateful to experience it swinging into gear just at the time I have most needed it.  It is always difficult for anyone to find themselves in a situation where one can feel genuinely under personal threat; to understand that for others your life's work, leadership approach, and who you are as person represents a threat, engenders fear, hatred and anger the antithesis of one’s sense of self. I know that this feeling of being demonised has been the experience of the multitude of minoritised, persecuted groups and the fate of those that seek to represent them.  I am proud to stand alongside them as I face these relatively insignificant discomforts.

Detail from work lead by artist Ailie Rutherford at Glasgow Women’s Library, Pouring In, Pouring Out. Supported by items from the GWL archive and books from the Feminist Exchange Network library, and building on a University of Glasgow study, lead by researcher Louise Lawson, the work maps out the multiple roles and responsibilities of participating women, their experience of precarious, undervalued and invisible labour and moving towards a more equitable economic system.

We may have positive intentions and ways of working, in my case always aspiring to the dialogic, to kindness and to keeping a clear eye on the overarching structures that seek to divide and rule but we cannot control or determine the dynamics and expressions of the unmet needs of others. I know my aims are habitually to be curious about divisions, to want to heal, to host dialogue not exacerbate conflict, to resist the easy route of demonising others even when I myself or those that are vulnerable are subject to wilful misrepresentation by them. In these circumstances, (personal and in their wider context of 'warring') of hurt and harm I feel so very grateful to have friends who have guided me carefully to keep to the path of courage and compassion. An extract from a text that a wise friend has given me advocates the ways that we can ‘ have the courage and compassion to investigate our tender heart… (to) stay with it as much as we can and to expand it to keep opening our hearts to suffering without shutting down…with a promise of uncovering the limitless qualities of love, compassion, joy and equanimity (and) to extend them with others.' That is what I hope to learn and that is what friendship is. I’ve been so touched by the numbers of people who have reached out, stepped in, exercised and extended kindness. This characterises our power to thrive and learn even under testing conditions, focusing on what connects us. I have no desire to fan the flames of antagonism or to succumb to fear, bullying or unkind acts. It has been wonderful to be able to witness the exemplary evidence of leadership all around me at GWL, amongst the staff, Board and volunteers. I am the beneficiary of love, support and care whether this it comes in the form of helpful pragmatism, actions that strengthen and support through networking, through to gifts, messages and expressions of compassion and understanding in all its forms. So thank you to everyone who is part of the beautiful, expansive internationally connected matrix of love and hope. I am humbled to be in your thoughts to have this incredible gift of solidarity and friendship. I know of so many who do not have such webs of support and advocacy as they face off deeper challenges, hatred and harm. My own sense of purpose, a demand I am making of myself as a feminist leader is a redoubled commitment to reciprocate and reflect back all the kindnesses I have felt to others who are most in need of it.

Detail from @thedundeetapestry visited this past week at V&A Dundee.

Reflection 3rd February 2024

connections, creativity, culture, challenge, growth, care, kindness, peace, freedom, grace, joy, love

Since my last blog, I have had an interesting first trip to Albania. I was invited by the wonderful @curatedplace to participate in a gathering that brought together British creatives and cultural workers and colleagues in the creative industries in the Western Balkans. I loved being in Tirana and in the warm, welcoming and inspiring company of remarkable people, including artists, producers and curators working in a range of disciplines, spaces and organisations. I heard from political representatives too who demonstrated striking and refreshingly high levels of cultural literacy, something that is surely essential for the effective strategic, and conceptual development of a nation’s idea of, as well as representation of itself. Albania is critically choosing to bring together the departments of creative industries and finance; creativity is being incorporated into thinking about everything from wellbeing to economic prosperity. It was clear that cultural development and strategy is not seen as a luxury that the country cannot afford. I made some really excellent connections with people and organisations including a new reading space and publishing resource @berkbotine and colleagues who are developing gender aware spaces, conversations, publications, and ideas such as @bulevard_art_and_media_institute.

The Pirimida, Tirana, the venue for the Creative Encounters gathering.


It was with some sadness that I arrived back to face a further raft of orchestrated external challenges. Intersectional feminist leadership is nothing if it is not about the necessity of staying curious about complexity and sitting with discomfort even when it is articulated in extremis as it has been for me of late; in expressions by others of loathing, disgust and rage. Different and wide ranging opinions on feminism are of course familiar to me and welcome at GWL, but increasing levels of online abuse towards me and us as an organisation have required next level degrees of resilience.  Turbulence and change is always a given when you are working in an equalities focussed field; there has never been scope for complacency or a time when GWL has not faced precarity in some form of another. I regard this as yet another an opportunity to learn and grow, to practice compassion and reflect. The challenges have encouraged me to recommit to my lifelong aim to make spaces for discussion, understanding and connection rather than foster exclusivity or advocate for the silencing of others. I know fully that kindness sits at the heart of my being, and that optimism, justice, positivity and hope are my motivation and anchor. I believe more in love and kindness as an antidote to the world’s appalling warring on all registers than at any other time in my life and that these qualities are indicative of strength not weakness. I have discovered through these challenges more about what I have wanted to achieve in my work at GWL and in many of the other projects I have been involved with and that at the core is a desire for peace and the freedom to be. Having awe inspiring, brave and positive colleagues who are motivated by just ideas and joy is critical to be able to pause in the face of deep personal critiques and still access and feel a sense of wonder. My thanks go out to all those who provide inspiration for me in their grace, humility, strength and awesome capacity to love including those that have reached out directly to me with their support. One beloved pal spent valuable time with me the midst of the raging storm, reminding me that all that is permanent is the sun, the moon and the truth (thank you!). Sometimes the auspicious timing of things makes me laugh out loud. In the midst of the negative cloud that descended on my return from Albania I was distractedly opening a parcel that had arrived while I was away. I had so much to contend with, not least the care of others at GWL and the volume of work that navigating challenge necessarily involves, but was ambushed by joy on opening a beautiful gift, a delayed posting from the Saltire Society but actually arriving with perfect timing from the universe. So, love is there, support is there and I've had so many moments to appreciate that; a humbling of ego and a cherishing of all that I have. Thanks to everyone who has connected, each and every gesture of care means the world and is motivating and strengthens my resolve to follow our just course.

A welcome message of love and appreciation from the Saltire Society: the Fletcher of Saltoun Award for contribution to public life, 2022.

Reflection: 26th January 2024

refreshing, visiting, connecting, collaborating, learning, conversations


This, my first website, was launched on the 31st of December 2021, so I am now celebrating three uninterrupted years of weekly blogging. The practice, initiated tentatively as a form of public journalling drawn from my weekly  voice memos and that would act as a conscious tool for self relfection has yielded so many wonderful, positive and unexpected conversations, connections and opportunities. The blogs will continue to be written rooted in my heartfelt compassion for people, for communities, for nature and with a sense of hope for peace, love and progressive change in the world but will no doubt continue to grapple with the ‘stuck’ stuff. Since the website itself needed a refresh, it's designer, Mae Moss has worked with me on a revamp. I'm really happy to be sharing it with you along with this latest crop of blogs. I'm really hoping that people will continue to drop into my musings, and that you will find it easier with this refreshed website design to find information about me and my work and to make contact with me. I welcome feedback on any aspect of my work that you might want to follow up on, whether that is; making connections and suggestions for things to widen my knowledge or that would help me to understand more fully, with ideas of things to read, visit or listen to, for enquiries about working with me or ideas that might grow into a creative collaboration. I'm looking forward to the year ahead when I'm going to be sharing more about who I am meeting, what I'm learning and ideas for ways that we can might work better to effect positive change. One of the new dimensions to the website is my shared calendar where I will be flagging up some of the different places where I am planning to be working, collaborating, doing some public sharing of knowledge, or visiting so I look forward to meeting people in person in lots of different spaces and places in the months ahead. Thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to feed back to me about these blogs in particular or who has made contact through this website in the past year. It is hugely encouraging to know that people have taken the time to read and respond and I look forward to connecting with more of you in 2024.

Reflection: 19th January 2024

reorientation, emotional literacy, feelings, needs, care, commitment, change

In the processing, reflecting and reorientation that gets done over this first month of the new year I have been thinking about what I have learnt, in particular having had the opportunity to get to work and collaborate more with individuals and colleagues in a range of settings in an independent capacity. I have always worked with others in partnerships, groups and teams but this past year I have been doing more of this as an individual as well as my role as a Director of Glasgow Women’s Library. The intentional focus of this strand of work is one that allows for deep and honest conversations with people involved in cultural, creative and collections work about how we do things, why we do things, and with a specific interest in responsibilities, purpose and accountability around (shared) leadership. I’m interested in the degrees of emotional literacy required to support and manage ourselves and others; many of us can feel either ill equipped and, or under supported to do this work in sustainable ways. I feel strongly that change is needed in cultural leadership and we are reaching a crisis point. I was struck recently by some research references about burnout, cynicism and detachment in workplaces cited in the Radical Candour podcast that indicate that we are right to feel concerned. Although the research focusses on the corporate sector I think it is worth citing here as there are common refrains (of overwork, anxiety and a lack of faith in the ‘old leadership playbooks’) surfacing in museum, cultural and creative work settings:

According to Gallup, only 31% of managers are actively engaged and more than 50% are actively seeking new jobs amid declines in employee engagement and wellbeing, record turnover and hiring rates, and an unprecedented increase in hybrid work.

According to the National Institutes of Health, “Burnout is a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are an overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.”

The Future Forum Pulse report — a survey of almost 11,000 workers across the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. published in October — found that executives’ sentiment and experience scores had sunk to record lows. Compared to a year ago, execs reported a 15% decline in the working environment, a 20% drop in work-life balance, and a 40% increase in work-related stress and anxiety.

“We’re in the middle of the biggest workplace paradigm shift we’re likely to see in our lifetimes, and leaders are feeling that pressure,” said Sheela Subramanian, vp and co-founder of Future Forum.

She added that the shifting macroeconomic conditions, the Great Resignation, and the changing demands of employees around flexibility make it “harder to lead with confidence — you can no longer rely on the old leadership playbooks.”


Working with the Arts School Plus cohort in the summer of 2023 brought me hope in the upcoming generation of values led leadership in the creative and cultural sector. Photo: Ella Snell

This year I will be actively working on ways we might develop alternative, values led equalities rooted leadership approaches and struck by how it is commonplace for teams and leaders to lack confidence in the literacy of their own and others feelings and needs and how this registers emotionally, psychologically and in somatic ways. This shift for me into this strand of independent work has allowed me to explore ways I can actively support myself and others to fathom ways that we can all work with courage, care and commitment to bring about change in the different contexts we find ourselves working in but where there are common concerns.

Reflection: 12th January 2024

pivoting, ebbing and flowing, dynamism, stretching, shifting, excitement, challenge, momentum, spontaneity

This has been work ‘re-entry’ week after an extended winter break but I'm still very much in that state of pivoting from the end of one year into the start of another. In my last blog I mentioned the value I place on my ‘Inventories’ or reflection points. I try to make sure these happen every few weeks, but the start of the year offers the opportunity to look through all the inventory notes that I've taken over the year that has passed. This practice offer me snapshots of where I have been in all senses, the ebbs and flows of what I have been thinking and feeling, what I have needed, what's been working and where and what the ‘stuck’ stuff is. Amongst the themes for me across the year is dynamism a clear, strong sense of (pro)actions taken and deep shifts whether that is the positive and welcome wave of new friendships and connections and in some instances people close to me moving away, personnel changes in my workplace and the logged instances of my own 'stretching’ and moving and there being self directive shifting into new areas, clear instances of where I have taken responsibility for and kept momentum and movement towards my lodestar. I'm also noting related to this theme of ebb and flow that there are unceasing profound changes in the world, in my working contexts and my relationships with others which is bringing excitement and deep challenge. Throughout (and this in a theme since 2021 when these blogs started) I see how nature plays an incomparable anchoring role for me and, specifically the solace and joy I have found trees and water. My well being is very much dependent on feeling warmth in all senses but I have like so many others over the past year or so become more attuned to and drawn to cold water encounters. I have been swimming so much more indoors and outdoors and have sought out this past year places where I can be beside water it's all its naturally occurring forms (I think after the privations and restrictions of Covid this will always remain an acute need). I have also noted the strengthening of the connective tissues of friendship and kin. This past year critical friendship has been an incredibly vital source of not just support and joy, but has helped the incubation of my ideas. Friends have offered generous criticism and feedback on my work and their wisdom and insight as I navigate changes. I can see too momentum building in the post COVID period and want to ensure that the year ahead progresses at a pace that feels manageable to the degree I can control this.  To return briefly to this refrain of nature as an anchor. On Christmas Day, I watched this remarkable documentary Songs of Earth by the Norwegian filmmaker Margreth Olin. I'd heard Olin speaking a little bit about the benefits of being outside in an interview on Front Row and though there can no doubt be risks and restrictions associated with being outside for some, for very different reasons in specific contexts there are also compelling reasons, made so evident for so many of us as we navigated the restrictions during Covid, to drink in the outdoors. Olin talked about how much time we spend nesting, hunkering down and being indoors and that for younger people many of whom may well live to be 100, 90 of those years will on average be spent indoors. This surely runs counter to how humans are meant to live their lives, that is in close contact and proximity to nature. I am feeling (and noting in my recordings) a heightened consciousness, a desire to be looking up at the sky, at nature, at bird life and at trees and opening up to the often uplifting chance encounters with people in outdoor contexts.


New Year Forest bathing near Rowallan.

I am linking this to this dynamic of managing change of consciously developing confidences and a sense of enduring things. The antithesis of stasis and ‘stuckness’ it is a commitment to learning things, seeing things and striving for widened horizon and perspective whether that's from a deeper appreciation of the lived experiences of others, in formal and informal learning settings (I'm brimful of joy to have embarked on a swimming stroke improvement class…and noted in ‘inventories’ how much I had gained from undertaking somatic leadership training and knowledge gained from coaching supervision in 2023… ) All these activities help one reflect on what there still is for us to learn and how critical it is that we remember not just that we need to be actively seeking new terrains where we can encounter challenging ideas and perspectives and new skills but also what it feels like to step into them (often with some sense of fear and uncertainty). I think I've spoken about this before but that sense of fear and excitement and anticipation of stepping in and the appreciation of what it feels like at the end of a class or hosted or deftly held conversation that has been led well is instructive for any of us who are in the business of leading learning. Instructive, always, to ask ourselves, What made that facilitation work (or not)? What can I learn from that experience when I am encouraging others to make the step? The final thing that I wanted to mention was a lesson learnt (from pal Ramaa – thanks again Ramaa!) this year… of holding this notion of momentum towards aims but with a looseness, an openness to change, leaving ‘a wide berth of spontaneous creativity’. This is a habit I want to practice throughout the year ahead…

Reflection: 5th January 2024

transition, mapping, planning, recording, anchoring, purpose


This last week has involved the transition into new journals, notebooks and diaries and work and life plans. These blogs and the recordings that they are drawn from are amongst the raft of record making I do each week. The more functional note taking, accounts of meetings, jottings, endless task lists, planning, thought maps and other diaried and logged aspects of my work and personal life I have kept over decades, Many of these notebooks and diaries (at least the covers!) have been collated by Mae Moss and make an appearance on this website. I have always loved note taking, my own and others; marginalia is one of the joys of working in a Library. It has become increasingly important to me to have good vehicles and motivation for reflection in the form of inviting notebooks and diaries. I know how easy it is to not to record, journal or track thoughts and plans but without recording things I know I can feel the sensation of sleepwalking into the future. I love rediscovering old thoughts written in my hand. They can surprise me with either their freshness or their reinscription or sense of circling back to the birth of a now cherished idea. I want to be open to spontaneity and to shifts and changes but alongside some sort of sense, provided for me by my notetaking of where I am in relation to my North Star. I need to be able to set aside time and have the tools to review how my actions and impacting on myself and others. Are my actions bringing me I getting closer or further from my goals? I like having places for keeping these records through the year and to have kept them over the years. My own collection gives me an idea of what my sense of purpose might have been over some 30 or 40 years. This week I embarked on one of my inventories that are my pulse points in the year where I set aside some time to really reflect on what has been happening over in recent weeks, which was as ever really productive exercise. I generally try to resist making annual resolutions, instead these inventories provide an opportunity for me to think about the ways that my intentional actions over this next year can shift the dial in some of the areas where I want to make headway. Another anchor this week has been conversations with close friends. I can feel a little bit stuck in the immediate wake of the new year so have been appreciating connecting with people and starting to feel the sap rising again. Notwithstanding the evident challenges of the year ahead I am choosing to pay attention to the lengthening light levels and the prospect of what I can choose to make happen and record in my 2024 diary.


Fresh, customised, motivating diary for 2024. Stickers from @leftbankbookscollective Seattle and @lindersterling

Reflection: 31st December 2023

timelessness, nature, luminosity, life, emotions, courage, beauty, thole, endurance

It's Sunday the 31st of December.
Over the Christmas period I was lucky enough to be staying in the evocative, beautiful setting of Ellisland, in the farm that was the home of Robert Burns and Jean Armour, it is the place where Burns wrote Auld Lang Syne, Tam O’ Shanter and John Anderson My thoughts, like so many others turned in this period (and perhaps heightened in this location) as the year end approached, to the fleeting nature of time and life. Some of my holiday reading in Ellisland stoked this sensibility. I first read Tam O’ Shanter at school but appreciated it so much more at this remove, specifically the luminosity and timeless profundity of the lines:

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white—then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.—
Nae man can tether time or tide;

Here, in Ellisland I also read a beautiful gifted anthology of selected prose and poetry by Nan Shepard. Some of these works spoke to this idea of the unfinished business of life and learning. I was really touched by the beautiful evocation of this idea in her short story Descent from the Cross where Shephard remarks, 'Life needs the dark, slow decay of countless, myriad frustrations to provide a soil for growth.’ In her poem 'In the Cairngorms'. Shepherd uses the term Thole a Scots word that was new to me, meaning, to endure. Endurance has become a watchword for me in my reflecting and writing about living a feminist life and specifically feminist leadership. I was interested to discover the etymological links between this term and the Middel English term Tholemod meaning forbearance, patience and endurance. How to endure in the face of deep challenges has been a question for so many over the past months, the past year, the past decades as conflict and culture warring is increasingly the order of the day. A critical understanding for me of ways to endure has been a deepening recognition of the fleeting nature of time (we need to act, move, be!) but also the fleeting nature of emotions. My dear pal Charley sent me one of her profound gems recently, a quote from the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama that speaks to this idea. Ó Tuama notes that when the Irish talk about emotion, ‘You don't say I am sad one says sadness is on me’.  The implication here is that we don’t need to identify with the emotion fully, such that I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is for a period ‘on me’ and something else will be on me another time. There is clearly some melancholy and sadness as well as incipient hope ‘on me’ as the bells beckon, some sort of humbling recognition of the scale of the learning yet to be done about oneself and others and a reminder to be in an accepting state of thole in life; a refrain in recent years, and a resignation to the self-work that lies in the year ahead. I am still drawing strength and courage from the beauty experienced in Ellisland and recognising once again, humbly and appreciatively that I endure better when fuelled by the bounty of nature. 

On the edge of time in Ellisland.

Reflection: 22nd December 2023

gratitude, gifts, sharing, curiosity, kindnesses, interchanges, friendships

The working year ended yesterday and I am finding myself in a state of quiet gratitude and appreciation for entering the rest period without carrying a freight of dread, fear or worry about the nature of things in my working world – in stark contrast to the thoughts we now need to grapple with summoned by the catastrophic events unfolding globally.
So often end of year holiday periods of the past have been solely about recovery and girding myself for the taxing, anxiety inducing issues that I may be returning to in the new year... of premises under threat, funding crises, communication issues and the panoply of things that can cumulatively constitute the ‘weigh’ of feminist leadership. I am mindful each and every day of the rise in populism, of warring, of the denials of human rights, of persecution and genocidal atrocities… I am anything but complacent about the state of the global political situation but know enough to take time out when I have the privilege and opportunity to do so to 'winter' and place my attention on thankfulness for the year's passing with so many positive things also having happened. In my case this year end it is about reflecting on old and long friendships strengthening of new and newer friendships forging in wonderful and surprising ways, of how much I have learnt, how some actions I have taken have resulted in positive outcomes for myself and others and with a sense of appetite for the learning and the work known and unknown that lies ahead. I appreciate working with so many people where deep thinking, reflection, curiosity and vulnerabilities are a shared currency, in the dialogic culture that we currently enjoy, notwithstanding the attendant (and necessary) discomforts that change making work entails at the Glasgow Women's Library. I am thankful for what I am thinking of as a daisy chain I am a beneficiary of, of knowledge and reference points and resources that are being continually and carefully added to by kind people through generous generative interconnections. Gifts exemplified by resources shared or passed on to me this past week. I'm thinking here about a discussion I know will stay with me over the winter break, with colleagues Gabrielle and Mattie, where we were grappling (again) with the fascinating terrain of feminist organograms, a topic those who know me know is an endlessly hot topic. The meeting was thought provoking and Gabrielle shared a wonderful illustration from a Ugandan group that was new to me – the Team page of an organisation civsourceafrica.com (what an inspiring way of thinking about the vexed area of Job Titles!) adding to a store of great innovations by global changemakers whilst Mattie having heard me raving about Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy gifted to me a beautiful Plume Annual that features work by Alsadir, Anna Kavan, Ghislaine Leung, Mira Mattar, Lila Matsumoto and Bhanu Kapil amongst others.  In this last week of work such interchanges left me feeling buoyed – what a luxury to not be so frayed or overwhelmed by ‘the everything’ to have the time to share thoughts, explore ideas and inspire one another. Such interactions inside and outside of work makes me feel excited for the future and more hopeful for the year ahead.
I am now packing to set off to a new place Ellisland for few days nested, walking, wintering and celebrating the year’s end with loved ones. Taking the carefully stored pile of reading (including my Plume Annual!) fit for hibernation and refuelling.

Reflection: 15th December 2023

pathways, support, resources

This month, as I have discussed in earlier blogs, I have had to turn my attention to the gendered ways that hate is articulated. On that note, I first wanted to pass on two excellent resources that I have had flagged up to me by colleagues and supporters recently and I wanted to share with others in need of or interested in navigating the challenges of social media 'pile-ons'. The Charities Against Hate Guide provides ethical digital marketing and communications for the third sector and Glitch is a website and award-winning charity that acknowledges the scale of online abuse and its most frequently targeted groups namely Black women and other people of colour,  LGBTQIA+ and other marginalised people. It is committed to addressing the issues of online abuse by educating people (including myself) on how they can engage positively, respectfully and justly in all digital spaces.  Glitch succeeded in prioritising women & girls’ safety in the Online Safety Bill, I would recommend it as a vital and relevant resource and appreciate the work required to develop and sustain it. I want to express my thanks to all those that have reached out and offered pathways such as this and acknowledge the efforts sitting behind the support that is out there created by feminist and values led leaders. As I shape my research and writing project around feminist leadership (and get to grips with the online forms of toxic, gendered leadership in real world encounters day to day ) I was intrigued to catch an interview with Dr Elizabeth Pearson during the week. Pearson’s new book Extreme Britain; gender, masculinity and radicalisation explores just that, the gendered nature of power and the leadership of radical political groups. In an interview in the Bunker Pearson makes an interesting theoretical connection between the dynamics of gender and extremism and how misogyny and masculinity is increasingly clearly implicated in forms of radicalism. Her empirical research with leadership and political extremism whether within the English Defence League, or al-Muhajirain Group explores how such modes extremism is so often manifesting forms of hatred of women. It seems so self evident that populist leadership and its links to radicalisation, has this ubiquitously apparant facet of gendered hatred and harm but it is rarely articulated in news media. Pearson speaks about her research subjects having formed misogynistic ideas about women before radicalisation and these become more fully realised through political extremist indoctrination and the processes of becoming  a leader resulting in a fulfilment of these gendered aspirations (of masculine strength and women's subjugated role) that are born out in the radicalization ‘journey’. I have been thinking about this in terms of different manifestations of leadership and the different forms of more orthodox, normative leader journeys and the characteristics accorded to strong leadership in politics, cultural and other institutional settings. Insisting on a gender critique of leadership seems more and more urgent as we are failed by so many who have been given these responsibilities and women are often the principle collateral cost of these often unchecked abuses of political and institutional power.
Managing to experiencing so many moments of appreciation and joy in amongst the thickets of challenge, from discussions, dancing, connections, visioning and actions bringing about hope and change in work contexts, and reading and listening adventures (not least Cheb Malik’s After Rai) also keeping me bouyant as I prepare for the year’s end. 

Reflection: 8th December 2023

soul, profundity, grace, dignity, care, work


Images of Bhangra ‘daytimers’ from the 1980s and 1990s in Manchester Museum, South Asian gallery. Photo: Time Smith.

I'm just back from the second short visit to Manchester in the past month. On the last trip it was wonderful to be finally spending time at Manchester Museum where Esme Ward, her colleagues and the many wonderful communities of the city have been busy reshaping this important civic resource. I learnt so much and would highly recommend taking a tour with one of the museum guides. On this visit I found the show curated by Lubaina Himid at HOME, A fine toothed comb truly soul salving.  It was so refreshing to encounter a group show (the exhibition deftly combined the work of Himid, Magda Stawarska, Rebecca Chesney and Tracy Hill) that was full of profundity and that so gracefully underscored the evident depth of communication between those showing together in one space. The conception and execution spoke of volumes of care and attention paid to the impact of works (visually and aurally) within the space and I found it beautiful, evocative and thought provocating. The themes including climate destruction, the mercilessness of housing precarity and an uncovering of the ‘invisible geological, historical, environmental and political layers of the city’ were both ambitious but gracefully handled and powerfully addressed.


Detail from Rebecca Chesney’s work featured as part of the exhibition A Fine Toothed Comb, HOME Manchester. Chesney has redacted lost species of birds from the Handbook of British Birds.

I am in a process of restoring the connective tissues of hope that have been stretched over the last wee while and I had a great opportunity to do so this week in working with the wonderful Norwich based Young Cultural Leaders project. To be in the zoom room with so many young young people sharing their vision of what leaders can and need to be and the characteristics of leaders that they admire was wholly uplifting. And finally, in my efforts to say stay ‘curious not furious’ I followed up on a recommendation by colleague, Gabrielle, a source of so many brilliant reading recommendations over the years who had encouraged me to read Elif Shafak's small but powerful text How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division.  I love the way that Shafak acknowledges the value of anger in the face of injustice, regarding it as a 'dignified human response' and as the 'antithesis of indifference', but also, critically she cautions us to exercise care since ‘anger can also easily turn repetitive, intransigent, corrosive [and become] a paralytic emotion [...] It’s as if the intensity of it is enough to persuade the person feeling that they've done enough -  or else it might keep you in a state of brooding and obsessing over the wrong without being able to move forward.’ Shafak cites Toni Morrison as a model here...‘I get angry about things then go on and work’.

Reflection: 1st December 2023

curiosity, empathy, exploration, relationships, support, joy


Birthday book gifts bringing reading joy for winter days.

This week, (with another birthday’s passing today and where the demands of the recent months have been extreme) I feel I have really been able to gauge the changes I've been undergoing the last few years. In the past I know I have found the sorts of threats and difficulties I have encountered this week as existentially challenging to the degree that they would have seemed insurmountable. But at the week's end I am noticing that I have shifted the dial. Learning is so often hard won, but I am lucky to have had wise counsel in abundance (since I have chosen more often now to ask for for it). I am also increasingly dogged in my commitment to get to grips with 'relational dynamics'; I am less about avoidance and fear and much more about critical reflection. My mantra this week, this past mont, this past year? Be Curious, Not Furious. Somehow I have developed learning and that has made shifts in my thinking that has led me to a much more compassionate much less conflictual cast to my courage. I owe so much to so many for getting me here (and know that the work is far from done !) and this week, the firefighting on top of onerous workloading was made so much less of a thankless trial. In fact I can say on reflection that it has offered up a fruitful learning adventure because of kind people being willing to step up, and share their own knowledge, expertise and wisdom.  One new connection, calmly, generously and empathetically walked me through the ways to avoid with what they described as the pitfalls of being swept up by the 'riptides of bullshit' that those of us involved in different forms of values led leadership are sadly increasingly encountering as part of our work.  Listening and learning from this support of support was a pivot point that made the rest of the week's challenges infinitely more manageable. Another friend called unprompted to compassionately coach me through the trails they knew I might be facing with love and care. I know that I have respect for myself, care deeply for those that I work with, and that I can summon up kindness for, in this instance, people who are ostensibly signalling their hatred for what I stand for. This knowledge of my own capacity (as well as vulnerability) gives me hope. I recognise that we are dealing, as ever, only with forms of feelings and (unmet)needs. We all have them and in the context of permacrises and atomisation and distortions of interelations due to the paradigm shift to the digital that the times we are living in are propogating some internecine relationships, fears and hostilities. Above all I have been led this week to thinking about how I might want to fathom my purpose in all of this and deciding that I want to (continue to) be in learning mode where possible, and aspire to modelling a form of leadership that is exploratory and is open to shifting and changing according to new information and what I feel might be helpful and bring about movement change that is inclusive and progressive. I am committed to creating and using dialogic pathways forward rather than a polarised conflict focused approach to the world. And amongst this realising once again that I am not alone! Apart from the wonderful support that I've received from colleagues and GWL board members and a band of magnificent pals, familt members and supporters in my wider network I have been delighted by the process of forging new friendships and relationships of solidarity and shared understanding with those who have more experience of being in the eye of very specific storms that we've been weathering of late. Testing times can so often illuminate a renewed awareness of the amazing connective tissues of love that are there of people who 'get me' and to know that this care only expands as a result of me being myself and excercising the courage necessary in situations where it is called for. I was touched by those who had no idea that that I was managing the crap, and it made it all the more poignant to be receiving thoughtful and beautiful gifts in the lead up to the end of the week and my birthday. One such was a lovely wee painting sent to me by my Dad.  


It depicts a view from a shady path down to a bay and evokes for  me a treasured memory of the two of us chatting whilst paddling in wonderful warm Meditteranean waters. I received it at the perfect moment;  my senses were flooded with a remembered joy and the light and happy times of this past summer.

Reflection: 24th November 2023

pausing, stillness, agency, solace, restlessness, courage, nature, change

This weekend I took the opportunity to spend time with friends and loved ones in the countryside, breathing deeply, socialising, striding out and being still in the brilliant frost and sunshine, a brief but welcome pause in a period where turbulence and shocks to the system ​(the definition of trauma) seem to be the order of the day. I have been thinking about how our own individual experiences of dysregulation, surely a natural response to distress of 'everything' have an impact of organisational and sectoral dysregulation and what feminist leadership needs to be in the face of this now seemingly normalised state of distress - especially as the appalling, rolling news feeds seem likely to be perpetual. I am finding it grounding both to be alternating pausing and resetting with the need for a conscious grappling with the reality of the state we are in. The old, still dominant models of leadership are palpably not working; they are failing and we are being failed - in the face of this inertia what can we carve out that will give us all some form of strength in our own capacity and agency and to feel a sense of illumination, breakthrough and hope? I have been keeping my writing practice alive – a helpful thread for me through an often daunting maze with no idea of what lies at the heart or if and when there will be a meaningful exiting some day. There seems to be no alternative than a leaning into the complex questions and challenges we face day to day and these are now at the core of what I am trying to attend to in my work, in my writing and thinking and coming to terms with this has felt like a solace in itself.
The darkening days can mean intensified feelings and low batteries but I know that in a few weeks we will be past the shortest day and there will be a resumption of light. Reading fiction becomes in dark days an invaluable source of comfort. I have two transporting novels on the go at the moment, The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and Du Maurier's first novel, The Loving Spirit. As I came to write this I realised that both are about the symbolic tyranny/freedom represented by the sea and the gravitational pull of characters to it, about restlessness, storms, courage and heart wrenching loss. Novels and poetry help when I am in need of anchoring and transporting. Poetry that has made me think and brought me joy this past week came in the small but beautiful, incredibly well crafted volume by Morag Smith. Morag is just one of the creatively courageous colleagues that I have the pleasure and privilege of working with at Glasgow Women’s Library. Morag has been carefully and skillfully honing her independent practice as a writer and poet and I was really delighted to get my own copy of her latest book Background Noises this past week, and finally, spend some quality time with it. This new collection was inspired by the history of Dykebar hospital, a mental health facility in Renfrewshire.  But from this specific locus Morag evokes wider ideas about loss, memory, spaces and places that are demolished, erased, destroyed by fire and abandoned and the inevitabilitiy of nature’s intervention. Birds, trees, flowers and plants inhabit, reshape and refigure buildings and institutions in urban landscapes but these works subtly fold in the idea of nature itself in jeopardy. This extract from  Collapse (Villa 20) gives a flavour: 

Did the end spiral down from blue sky,
or happen when we're fast asleep?
We failed to note the weight of sparrows landing,
until our cherished past split wide and deep.

It's happened now - I wonder if we'll sleep
again; a roof falls down in the night,
the future rolls in wide and deep. For you
there's no space life; change is everything.

Reflection: 18th November 2023

ethics, values, freedom, speech, ideas, perspectives, markets, materials, libraries


Cigarette cards, Barrowlands, Glasgow, 

A few blogs ago I mentioned my keen anticipation for the publishing of a series of videos created by David McMenemy of Glasgow University. I had heard David discuss their development as a contribution to the REVEAL (Reinforcing Ethics and Values for Effective Advocacy of Libraries) project at the annual CILIPS conference. The ten films are hugely helpful for anyone who is grappling with the complexity of demands and ‘asks’ of libraries in relation to rights and freedoms. They focus on the very topical terrain of freedom of expression and look at issues to do with autonomy, arguments around democracy and the importance of protecting access to speech including the voices that we may not want to hear as well as the forms of speech that we do. McMenemy carefully charts a course that illuminates how safeguarding freedom of expression plays into our responsibilities as citizens. He acknowledging the tensions between allowing for free speech without interference and a recognition of the ethics and responsibility of ensuring that information doesn't harm in specific ways. McMenemy brings his prodigious knowledge, experience and passion for libraries in his mapping of contested and increasingly incendiary ideas and issues such as censorship in a really lucid, rigorously informed way. The films provide excellent provocations for those of us building and safeguarding collections, especially within countercultural initiatives, in places such as GWL where we have the responsibility to convene around topics such as freedom of expression and human rights. The call unequivocally from McMenemy is to always err on the side of being selectors not censors (where the latter might be understood as assuming the capacity or prerogative to prejudge materials for everyone). I remember vividly how wrong this form of library censorship had felt when the Pink Paper was banned from open display in public libraries in Glasgow during the period when Section 28 was on the statute books; so much so that it prompted the incarnation of the Glasgow chapter of the Lesbian Avengers. Times have changed but issues of access and rights to free speech and collecting policies have arguably become even more charged lightning rods within the wider, febrile ‘culture warring’. The REVEAL project is a great resource and I would really encourage people to also look at CILIPS wider ethical framework; there is an unequivocal need for ongoing discussion on ethical frameworks for librarians and library resources today. 
In an effort to decompress from the horrors of world events I managed to catch a movie during the week and I would highly recommend The Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet). The themes of unstable and unreliable representations, the selective nature of memory and how prejudices, and assumptions and judgments are made about intention and people's behaviours well captivating and thought-provoking.
Time spent at the Barras was another antidote. I've mentioned before in these blogs how saddened I am about the way that markets seem to have been in a form of unfathomable managed decline; my vivid memories of markets with hundreds of stalls thronged with life and shoppers and affordable fish, fruit and veg in Doncaster when I was growing up feels like a wistful dream. But lately I have been feeling buoyed by the way that the Barras is seems to be going through something of a renaissance and have been trying to make more visits. There is something about the forms of material culture found on market stalls that always rouses my spirits, coming across intriguing salvaged objects and snatches of conversations, bargains and beauty. At the end of the week I made a trip to Yorkshire, to visit my Mum before an historic footlballing first, a Manchester derby at Old Trafford of the women’s teams. I was really touched on arriving in the early evening at my Mum’s back garden gate to note how she had laid out line of leaves as a guide down the pathway to her house. The leaves, glowing faintly fluorescent in the moonlight offered up the warmest (not to say admirably witchy) of welcomes.

Reflection: 12th November 2023

greifs, compassion, hope, thought, somatic language, communicating, behaviours

It's Sunday, the 12th of November, and the political tumult continues to predominate. I have been thinking a lot about the importance and value of empathy and how we mobilise it in one to one relationships, leadership contexts, workplace relationships and as an expectation of our political leaders. The lack of empathy in Westminister’s governing party is more evident than ever in recent weeks and this human defecit is having dramatic consequences on local, national and global events; on an individuals surviving living in the street to the stoking of apocalyptic warfare where thousands of lives are being lost. To what degree do our own expressions of empathy play a part in relational dynamics, organisational ecologies and the state of the body politic? In the face of feeling diminishing agency to affect change as geopolitical forces are weilded with a cavalier lack of care I've been thinking about the profound power of empathy (I know how when I have been a recipient that I have felt change is possible) Empathy is a tool that I want to explore more attentively in my relations with others including in the development of my coaching practice. This week in coaching supervision I was lead (empathetically) towards exploring this rich vein and I have subsequently been thinking about empathy in relation to Kim Scott's notion of Radical Candour and how in our efforts to ‘care personally’ (not superfically or in transactional, extractive ways) we need to be clear and confident about how our empathy might be 'ruinous' in our building of relationships with others. In recent training I became more aware how I might be more vigilant in my own empathetic approaches; never trying to please and apprease but allowing my soul and compassion for people to be my compass.  This was in my mind in a work context this week with the always brilliantly switched on students from Anthony Schrag’s excellent MA in Arts, Festivals and Culutral Management course. Our discussions (on how moribund or ‘stuck’ mainstream institutions can become more inclusive and relevant) led us to a shared moment of insight that all institutions (we were talking museums, galleries and festivals but let’s talk governments...) are only people and if empathetic people lead and constitute them then there is hope. It is reassuring to know that there are cohorts of students who are really understanding of the value of empathy, of being supportive, of the necessity of facilitating open often uncomfortable discussions and pursue values lead leadership. This is no small ask when the cultural sector is carrying an unprecendented  weight of expectation to deliver for all against the backdrop of perpetual conflict, trauma and precarity. In my final reference to the wonderful Barbican exhibition Re/sisters I wanted to conclude this weeks blog with this poster from the ‘embrace the base’ action at USAF Upper Heyward, 31 December 1982 and the message ‘Arms are for linking.’

Reflection: 4th November 2023

greifs, compassion, hope, thought, somatic language, communicating, behaviours

This week has continued to be overshadowed by the knowledge of the events unfurling in appalling and deeply distressing ways in Gaza and the countries that are associated with the conflict including Britain. Yesterday I was part of the demonstrations that have been taking place each Saturday, this time in Edinburgh at Waverley Station. Even in the midst of what feels like a powerful movement for change it is difficult to focus on hope because of the scale and complexity of the issues that require to be resolved in this specific context and their relationship to the superstructures of patriarchy, race politics, capitalism, histories of conflict and a global defecit of ethical leadership. The scale of the inequities that need to be acknowledged and addressed before peace can prevail seems impossible to comprehend and overwhelmingly dispiriting. I have found it hard to fully open up to joy. Closer to home there has been a wave of griefs and the managing of sad news for friends and loved ones, adding to a sense of loss predominating. I have valued discussions with kind and wise people and have appreciated the gift of connections with new people and old friends at this time. In the face of hopelessness I have tried to focus and attend to thinking and learning about how I can develop further my own responsibility to communicate with compassion and the consideration and appreciation of difference. How can I minimise my own 'violent' communications? How might I better understand and learn the ways I can attend to, minimise and avoid harmful behaviours?  Fortunately, I had the opportunity earlier this week to share ideas, work and learn with others this in a facilitation session around values led leadership. This sort of work feels more critical to do in thoughtful, honest and urgent ways with people who have the ‘power to convene’ and who can be agents for change. This was the fourth of five sessions, each use the same format but with different cohorts of colleagues from an academic institution. It is fascinating to see from the outside the often occluded patterns that arise within specific organisational cultures and be offered the privileged opportunity to support and encourage productive changes to unlock any 'stuck' areas and release positive potential. At the end of the week it felt acutely timely to be able to participate in an intense day of learning on Somatic Coaching with Peter Hamill the author of Embodied Leadership which approaches this topic using somatic approaches. Our working environments are increasingly locked into cerebrally focussed communications and work so it was illuminating to be able to focus of the ways we might work with a braiding of the emotional, the cognitive and critically the embodied way we behave and communicate with each other. This feels like a critical step in any efforts we might want to make to mitigate and deescalate conlficts at the micro and macro level. The work starts with the self and I am committing to furthering and developing my own self knowledge and strive to be a more effective part of the solution. This course underscored my appreciation that so much of what we see and experience and how we choose to act and communicate ourselves is as a result of unmet needs, and of feelings that are not heard and that these feelings and needs register in an embodied language. 


Jackie Kay bringing the joy as she cuts the ribbon to open the Jackie Kay Plaza at Strathclyde University.

Reflection: 28th October 2023

music, poetry, reflections, honouring

It's been something of a faltering start back into it the world again after illness and there have been some work and other demands that have meant that my getting back into the swing was more hectic than I'd wanted.  It's been important to carve out some space for resting in this process and also for actively seeking out positive things to mitigate the backdrop of the appalling unfurling of conflicts between Hammas and Isreal. One oasis I turn to is the Quest Love Supreme podcasts and when an antidote was needed I treated myself to an interview with Chaka Khan. At one point in this long, beautiful conversation I was cast back to being in the extremely humble, Women in Profile premises and being interviewed by DJ Jonnie Wilkes and Toby Webster in an earlier incarnation of their lives and mine for a sort of pound land version of Desert Island Discs (I think they may have been compliing interviews for a pirate station at the time.  One of my tracks was Chaka’s Ain’t Nobody, and another Gil Scott Heron’s, Storm Music. 30+ years later I’m pretty sure they would both still be in the list. Other icons that have brought much needed joy this week include Jackie Kay. I was absolutely thrilled to be in the audience for the inauguration of the Jackie Kay Plaza at Strathclyde University with Jackie cutting the ribbon and sharing her prodigious wit and wisdom with a suitably rapt and appreciative crowd. During COVID on one of my daily walks I remember coming across the deserted Plaza and seeing the inscription and it infusing me with with hope. Jackie spoke about her own history, about the idea of song being important in her growing up, for her parents, John and Helen Kay, and how song infuses her work. It was moving to hear how music from Paul Robeson to Scottish traditional music remain important to her in her practice and her life of activism. In a recent Herland event GWL used this poem by Jackie, A Life in Protest, inspired by Ingrid Pollard’s work for the library that illustrates this suffusion of music in protest in her work. Thanks to SCAN,  that the discussion that I had earlier this year with the remarkable icon that is Immy Kaur is now in podcast form and online along with all the other Decades series discussions, so please feel free to check these out if you have time and interest.
I did manage to make a visit to spend more time with the glorious Tartan exhibition at the Dundee V and A and caught the most uplifting, accomplished and beautiful show by Rachel Eulena Williams at DCA, an absolute triumph and a joy to be in the midst of.


Blissed out at the Rachel Eulena Williams show, Hair and Body at the DCA, (photo by my Mum, Christine Patrick, thanks Mum x)

Reflection: 21st October 2023

recuperation, rest, hope, laughter, joy, release

This week I have been ill so I have had an enforced period of what I've been trying to set aside as both Recuperative and Quality Rest time, distinguishable from ‘resting in order to be able to do’ or ‘resting in order to be able to create or work through something’. It's been a period of trying to literally be in a mode of both restoring myself in essence and care taking, as free of day to day pressures as possible. This, recovering without stress is an ongoing challenge for me (going against my nature). This time although I am noting I have given myself up to rest and recovery without work more easily that in the past, it has coincided with the escalation of conflict and appalling news from Gaza. It is our duty to be informed, to know, but I have felt palpably the ways that such news impacts the body, how it adds t underlying disregualation. I feel privileged to be able to have made a decision to limit exposure through rationing news feeds, avoiding social media, limiting conversations that inevitably turn to the unfolding crisis for at least the period of recovery. I know that feeling healthy is stymied by exposure to behaviours, actions and articulations of injustice that are the antithesis of the way that I want to feel about the world and the relationships and behaviours that you want to see reflected in it: love, compassion, equity, understanding. Illness can compound hopelessness in every sense, about one's own life and capacity and the agency of communities to bring about change. One of the refuges that I turn to when I want to recuperate and regain a foothold of hope is reading. When I was in London someone was kind enough to give me what was a timely and welcome gift, a copy of a book that has been a salutory source during this period, Animal Joy: a book of laughter and resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir



A psychologist and poet, Alsadir explores with erudition, joy and wit the ways that laughter works therapeutically, un/consciously, politically, bodily and in our relationships with each other. She speaks about how laughter is a deep, profound mechanism of release and discusses the idea of finding joy even within death and laughters’ associations with contexts of confronting, repressing and acknowledging trauma. All these associations are elegantly explored with degrees of humour, self reflection and profound insight. I was thinking about this notion of the always potentially eruption of laughter and jouissance in relation to some of the remarkable works that are that I had encountered in the exhibition at the Re/Sisters exhibition at  the Barbican, a show that has had a lasting impact since my return to Glasgow.


Multiple Clitoris (Iguazu Cataracts, Brazil/Argentina),  Carolina Caycedo, 2016 

Before I say any more about the ways these works and Animal Joy shifted my thinking I should add that this week alongside the unfolding horrors in Gaza there has been this build up of Storm Babet, a wild weather period that has been breaking over us the past day or so in Scotland and in extremes in the Midlands and North of England. In the short bursts of exposure that I've had to news and weather coverage, I have been reading the storms as devastating indicative of consequence of the neglect of the earth and the cataclysmic political events happening simultaneously has meant that nesting and succumbing fully to Quality Rest has been extremely difficult. The gift of Animal Joy and work such as that of Carolina Caycedo a Brazilian artist whose work drawn from the Iguazu cataracts in Brazil and Argentina are both deeply critical of abuses of power and yet full of jouissance.  Caycedo’s Multiple Clitoris works seems to me to ‘embody’ Alsadir’s conceptualisation of how joy and laughter and the body as understood by feminist actors can burst into and through even the most apocalyptic scripts of patriarchy, capitalism, and climate denial. Caycedo’s series Be Dammed  of which the above work is a part, ‘critiques, the mechanics of flow and control of rivers and dams to address the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impacts of extractive large scale infrastructural projects’. Her photographs of rivers and waterfalls are remodelled to evoke the fluidity of bodies (of water), ‘resisting the phallocentric logic of extraction.’ I was thinking about this disruptive, powerful mode of visioning in relation to the resurgence of interest in the idea of wells. When I am back on my feet I've made a commitment to investigate the well system in the city. Caycedo exemplifies an organic, orgasmic politics what she calls a pe’rpetually connected aqueous community’ - count me in!. So this is the sort of flow in all its sensesthat I want to tap into in this period of Quality Rest and I am hoping this current can help carry me and others through the darkening days of winter.

Reflection: 14th October 2023

focussing, pacing, responding, resting, grieving

The last two weeks or so have required shifting my focus and my pace and responding to very different working contexts. I committed to a new regime of making time for Quality Rest (I have been taking care to distinguish this from the sort of recuperative, recovery resting that so often seems to be the only sort of rest we might feel entitled to, if we can feel entitled to rest at all…). I was lucky enough to be able to take some QR thinking and writing time (too quickly over) next to Loch Linnhe, and then a pivot evening in Glasgow for the first Glasgow Women’s Library Herland event in post COVID times and then, the following day, to head to London for a week of working with and seeing people and art. It was a pleasure to be back working at the Cabinet Gallery space in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. I had been invited by Ella Snell to work with the second cohort of amazing artists who have made up the Art School Plus cohort. I'm often amazed how people's creative practices can be sustained and developed despite the enormous and ongoing challenges that there are, to keep the flow of creative thinking and positive energy, to be able to vision, plan and execute and it is such a privilege to get to work with people doing just that. My contribution to ASP is helping the cohort to develop ways to lead themselvesand others. I draw on my own experience of failing and succeeding in leading in different contexts and try to support others to build their own leadership ‘toolkits’. It was a joy to meet and work with this year’s committed, thoughtful and brave creatives and I'm really looking forward to seeing what Ella chooses to do in the next phase of this work. My participation Art School Plus involves sharing expertise and ideas but it's by no means a one way relationship. Amongst the many gifts an insights that the artists shared with me this year was a link to the Juno app. I wanted to pass this to the women and non binary creatives that might be looking for specific support to manage their finances. Money management (alongside leadership skills) is another thing seems to me to be only patchily taught to creatives in academic settings but this knowledge is increasingly important for any of us to be able to sustain our practice.


Chipko Tree Huggers of the Himalayas, 1994/2023 Pamela Singh exhibited at the Barbican, Re/sisters: a lens on gender and ecology

I was hugely impressed by remarkable, deep, multifaceted work on show at the Barbican as part of the Re/sisters: a lens on gender and ecology exhibition. It was exactly the content I was looking for as I try to sustain hope about the capacity to change the world. There was so very many contributors who I was encountering for the first time and some really amazing works that were new to me by artists I've known for decades including   some quite remarkable pieces by Judy Chicago. It was very fortuitous to coincidentally be in London to be able to accompany Sue John to pick up suffragette, Maud Joachim’s medal, just the week after GWL had successfully bid for it in a Bonham's auction. (The nerve wracking process had culminated in the online bidding online  the surreal setting of our wee rented bolthole near Port Appin). It’s quite rare for me to see an object for first time an object in this case in the form of a humble, small, battered leather case and be moved to tears. But this was the case when the medal was passed over Bonham’s counter for us to take it home to Glasgow Women's Library.


During Covid, Sue and I committed to writing and circulating a bulletin to the staff each week, and after Year 1 extending to every other week. It was sobering that without fail there was some tumult (Covid related or otherwise) to acknowledge, in these correspondences with the isolated GWL team, that these local and world events often as a result of human rights infrigements, lack of global leadership and discriminatory crimes might having a bearing on our state of mind, our hearts and souls. I was reminded of this this past week as each day was overshadowed with grief and sadness about the grotesque unfolding events in Gaza...everything I am doing, however positive in its intent is tempered with this grim and sorrowful overshadowing. My love goes out to all surviving the violence in all its forms.

Reflection: 6th October 2023

breathing, resting, discovering, heritage

Such a welcome break away this week ahead of an intensive week working in London; time to breathe deeply, walk, swim, read, relax, forage and run in the awesome setting of Kentallen and Appin. Only ninety miles from Glasgow but I felt transported; swimming in a divine, deserted stretch of Loch Linnhe that fortuitously is not visible on ordnance survey maps (it falls at the magical margins…and has evaded capture on Googlemaps…) Joy in abundance as I was able to harvest a host of chanterelles spotted under pines as I clambered over rocks in my wetsuit. Each day, so far, full of marvellous discovery; not least the lead quarries of Ballachulish. The quarry site is now a haven being reclaimed by nature with lochs, dramatic seams of quartz marbling the sheer sheets of slate that still bear the markings of being worked over decades. From the early twentieth century until its closure in the 1950s there would have been over six hundred men labouring here; Ballachulish produced the millions of slates that roofed Scotland.
I loved reading about Dr. Lachlan Grant, the medic for the quarrymen and their families and the successful workers Lock Out that occurred as a result of his being sacked for challenging the poor housing conditions of the slate quarry company. How did I not know that Grant campaigned for a State Health Service 40 years before the NHS and demonstrated awareness of the specific challenges for working class women, claiming “no class would benefit from a service more than woman folk, especially mothers in rural and outlandish districts’? The seeds of Communism and resistance to exploitation were germinated in Ballachulish through the experiences of protracted Lock Out and Grant’s advocacy of worker’s rights. Other Quarrying stories that were saved from historical erasure as part recent oral history gathering ahead of the formation of a moving Quarry Heritage trail were memories of the monumental lump of quartz that used to sit at the edge of the quarry known as the Dispute Stone. Locals remembered quarriers taking their quarrels to the stone to resolve – ‘you could not leave the Dispute Stone until you had sorted out your differences’. Perhaps another learning from history worth reinstating?
Finally, a wee note that my Decades podcast conversation with the remarkable @ImmyKaur is now available to download thanks to SCAN 

Reflection: 29th September 2023

hope, action, gratitude, culture, endeavour, courage

It's Friday the 29th of September, the week when Suella Braverman delivered the most chilling of her recent evocations of how the future might look for those seeking asylum in the UK. The speech, delivered in Washington but with dog whistles for zenophobes in Europe, unhelpfully blurred people experiencing discrimination in democratic countries with those fearing and fleeing persecution in countries where human rights are not upheld. I was so grateful that, fortuitously, I was able to participate in training this week led by colleagues associated with and hosted by the @ScottishRefugeeCouncil to get a much clearer, deeper picture of the reality of the experiences faced by migrants and refugees both today and in recent decades. I gained insight about the global trends and technologies of oppression and formed an overwhelming impression of the lack of ethical global political leadership and the ways that refugees are subject to abuses of power at the micro and macro level.  I valued the opportunity to discuss with others the realities and scale of the challenges for those caught within them brought home the cruelty of the rhetoric of Westminster Government and the hopelessness of the Home Office. The situation is beyond shameful. For any of us fortunate enough not to have had to flee our homes, families and support networks and the countries where our lives are rooted or to have had to face profound uncertainties about our futures including the existential crisis of being denied rights and citizenship with little or no support there is much to learn from those who have. People have had to find ways to survive in the acutely hostile environment that is the UK in the 21st century; many finding themselves without homes, facing unendurable poverty and the continual risk of violence. I am grateful to SRC for providing excellent resources, information, and facilitating vital conversations; their work has never felt more urgent. Amongst the many useful sources that were shared in the gathering I attended were two websites that I would highly recommend; free movement.org.uk provides updates, commentary, training and advice on immigration and asylum law, and migrants in culture is a migrant led design agency, that ‘is moving towards our collective capacity to imagine to live without borders’. A Scottish Refugee Council initiative that I'm now grateful to be involved with, is called cross borders.org,  a programme of arts and cultural activism projects. The creatives who are currently participating in the mentoring programme illustrate brilliantly the deep range of expertise and approaches to working creatives with refugee experience have; their skills and endeavours are helping to define the future of Scottish culture.

Reflection: 24th September 2023

reflections, readers, writers, artists, archivists, campaigners, curators


Some of the documents in the care of Mari Takayanagi at the Parliamentary Archives at Westminster photographed on a visit in 2016.

It has been week with lots of opportunities for action, reflection and meetings with people with interesting ideas. So encouraging to meet with Kim McAleese fresh from her triumphant directorial debut with Edinburgh Art Festival and to share thoughts about the power of archives. I was delighted too to finally host a return visit to GWL and talk collections with one of my archivist icons, Mari Takayanagi. Mari is the senior archivist at the Parliamentary Archives at Westminster and the tour she gave me in 2016 of the collections in Victoria Tower in the Houses of Parliament was one of the most spellbinding and memorable I have experienced. I was at the Houses of Parliament to give a talk about our March of Women project and Mari (a great champion of suffragettes as you might imagine) had made some of the most significant historic records available for myself and Sue John to see. One of the more contemporary documents Mari laid out for us was the Civil Partnership Act from November, 2004. It was a moment when the full significance of the weight of the collection she is a guardian of was brought home to me. Mari, a brilliant historian in her own right brought a welcome donation with her on her visit, her book, Necessary Women co-authored with Elizabeth Hallam Smith, is a truly fascinating account of the women who have worked, largely unrecorded and uncredited in Westminster. It is a jaw dropping account of sex workers, domestic servants, fugitive suffragettes and campaigners; the vital but forgotten women that comprise the  ‘monstrous regiment’ of heroines that have allowed Parliament to function for centuries (their vivid account of women working at Westminster starts in 1792). Zoe Strachan’s new book, Catch the Moments as they Fly was also added to my must reads this week; Zoe’s book launch event was a wonderful gathering and whetted my appetite for the deep ‘reading seasons’ that lie ahead as the nights draw in and to be transported to the places that these and other writers of history, fiction and poetry can take me. Despite the worst efforts of Aviva I had a great trip to @eseacontemporary this week. I was delighted to have been invited by @zhu_xiao_wen the dynamic director to launch esea contemporary’s Publishing Otherwise season. I was thrilled to catch the remarkable current exhibition by Dino Li (and to see the newly published accompanying publication) and see this unique institution that I have known in its different incarnations over many years thriving. 


There are an array of great zines on display in the foyer of esea contemporary.

Reflection: 16th September 2023

planning, flowing, visioning, momentum, ideas, sensing, responding, exploration, ingenuity

After five years of ongoing tumult on all the external fronts that need to be considered by organisations (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental, Cultural…), in which times engaging in meaningful Strategic Planning seemed an unrealistic aim, the GWL Board and staff team finally felt there was enough ballast to gather in order to make headway on visioning and planning for the future. We embarked on this together with a sense of productive and positive flow, with some moments of humour and with full commitment to charting with realism and vision how the organisation can move forward. I wanted us to be thinking freely and creatively (something that was less easy to do in an unfettered way as we emerged out of Covid Times) whilst holding in tension the paradox of structuring/chaos. I used two approaches developed by others to help us to both be open and anchored our thinking. I adapted extracts from Laloux’sReinventing Organisations and some thinking I have been doing inspired by the concept of Bounded Instability (thanks so much to Charley Barker for bringing the second source to my attention and to Carolyn Mumby for generating it). 
I like the passage in Reinventing Organisations where a bike riding analogy is used to discuss Strategic Planning. Longer term planning is an ongoing process (where calibrations, decision making based on changed terrain and conditions occur but with a clear idea about the direction of travel and the goal…) rather that an ‘top down’ directive (that assumes a description of how to ride a bike, with a map and a briefing for those riding will achieve the goal of getting a team to a destination without continual revue of multiple factors…)
This is my paraphrase of sensing and responding rather than predicting and controlling:

Predict and control:
A decision is made how the the bike will be steered.
We try to predict exactly where the bike is going to be and when.
We make plans and put in place controls (Gannt Charts etc)
We get on the bike, close our eyes hold the handlebars at the angle we calculated up front and steer according to plan.
If the bike fails, or we fall off we might say more upfront prediction is required…
We have an illusion of control.

Sense and Respond:
Steering is done not upfront but in continuous flow.
Micro increments are made based on context and circumstances all the time.
Steering is done with open eyes and consciously.
We take in data in multiple ways from different vantage points.
We chhose responses in the (informed) moment.
We are not directionless, purpose pulls us forward.

Adapted from Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organisations, first published 2014


Recent Strategic Planning took place with a backdrop of the final exhibition (on graphic design at GWL) of the ‘3 decades’ programme.

Mumby has written of the importance of both predictable systems and ‘of not knowing’ and of how allowing new and different information in to change structures is critical in coaching/leading contexts. Coaching and leading are facets of my work within and outside GWL and these themes seemed to me vital to consider in the scene setting for our strategic work. Mumby states, ‘the holding together of reliable structure and the emergent ‘not knowing’ is where we can be at our most potent, and supports the change we are often looking for [in coaching]. This can be particularly pertinent when we are coaching leaders, who need to be able to value a sense of coherence and also embrace a more agile exploration for the need for innovation and change.’
I am excited about what the work we produced together will yield in terms of impact for our partners, visitors, users, staff, Board and volunteers, our sustainability, relevance and endurance and our relationships with the sectors we work across and our funders.
There was a significant board meeting, GWL’s AGM the evening after the main Strategic Planning day. This felt like another watershed as long standing members stepped down after playing their part in steering us through the not inconsiderable choppy waters of capital building, relocation and Covid. It has been tough to sustain GWL whilst uncompromisingly exploring the ways that our staff and board relations can work to the optimum – inevitably a work in progress but something I am really proud to have participated in. It is rare to hear of people feeling positively and deeply moved at any Board meeting but this was the case as we celebrated both the achievements of the departing trustees and the strong, creative and capable board we have in place for the next phase of development. This week I felt like there was palpable evidence of the difference that working in feminist ways brings to the idea of governance and leadership not least in the genuine sense (and articulation) of appreciation we shared for each other during the Planning process and during the Board meeting. I am proud of the commitment the wider team has demonstrated to attend to the complexities and tensions around feminist working, of what we have managed to achieve together and how we are prepared to ‘stay with the trouble’.


One of the many stitched works produced by the Scottish Women’s Institute Federations on display at their Annual Conference.
The following day I travelled to Perth; I had been invited to speak at the Scottish Women's Institute conference and exhibition. I did wonder whether buoyed by enthusiasm for feminist leadership whether my gusto and advocacy for change would land -  it's always great to have one's expectations confounded, and this was a case in point. SWI is an organisation with incredible history, now going through significant change in order to be fit for the future. I was impressed with the shifts towards relevancy and sustainability that are undoubtedly well underway but also touched by encounters (with SWI stalwarts and new members, by displays of work and conversations) where the history of the organisation and its flexing around difference, driven by the lived experiences of women from acoss Scotland was fore grounded. The SWI history is indubitably one of formidable endurance (a largely volunteer led organisation for over 100 years, there is plenty for us to learn here…) and anecdotes shared on stage and in discussions with historians of the movement and others provided me with an impression that brought the potency, power and potential of the Institution alive. A recent SWI branch leader and passionate roller derby veteran spoke to me about how so many other roller derby elders have now migrated into a (thriving) new federation where they were bringing their passion, energy, sense of solidarity and support. After my talk I was caught by an SWI amateur historian who was keen to show me the remarkable cache of heritage materials she had gathered from many federations. She had been conscious of the possible loss of institutional knowledge and had been seeking out elders including SWI centenarians, some of them with truly remarkable stories and histories of stamina, ingenuity and commitment. I noted how, in a nonjudgmental how she alluded in her sharing of her research to the contributions of lesbian elders in the organisation… and that their histories needed to be honoured. It is always refreshing to have assumptions debunked and to celebrate the ways that differences, dissidence and human beings in all their complexities show up in the histories of (women’s) organisations. What it means for our organisations to survive, adapt, and thrive alongside and working with emerging initiatives is a question that seems ever more urgent to answer.

Reflection: 10th September 2023

gratitude, resting, discovery, reading

Arrived back from a trip to Menorca this evening. Full of gratitude for being able to spend time with loved ones, to swim in magical bays, to be in a green place with time to think, read, walk, discover new places, hear live music and eat good food. It was a treat to sail to Illa del Rei, to discover the beauty of the sculpture garden and to spend quality time with a remarkable body of work by Christina Quarles.
I deeply appreciate when artists and curators make texts they have selected available for browsing and reading and there was an abundance to discover in the comfortable space of the education lab.



Having hastily selected a random cache of holiday fiction reads before travelling I was thrilled that all were superb and to discover such a memorable array of brilliant, uncompromising older women protagonists. I loved, above all Dr Morayo Da Silva, the indomitable, stylish, witty Nigerian elder who is in the driving seat of Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s unforgettable Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun. Equally self-possessed and vividly drawn is Argentinian elder Elena, a mother who complex relationship with her daughter and Parkinson’s disease in Claudia Pineiro’s Elena Knows is deftly set against the wider sexual politics of caregiving, access to abortion and ageism. I also loved Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s epic accomplishment, There are More Things a brilliantly assured, completely absorbing, multifaceted story spanning generations of activism and identity politics in Brazil and London. How cheering to be experiencing riveting reads that centre the sexualities, griefs, humour, strengths and perspectives and strengths of older and younger women and the relationships between them, the complexities around the politics of reproduction and mothering, of queerness, feminism and personal and activist agencies. I highly recommend all.


Many reasons to be cheerful and grateful in Mahon.

Reflection: 2nd September 2023

values, leadership, movements, celebrations

This blog is a short one as I am finally switching off for a week.
In amongst the pre-holiday hurly burly it was a joy to set aside time to be at a GWL event conceived by Sue John that focussed on the Library’s fascinating anti-suffragette postcard collection in a double hander with GachiRosati an Argentinian artist who has also has this collection as a focus for her own recent works. In the wake of the cheering meetings with Momentum delegates last week it was similarly inspiring to be ‘meeting’ with international colleagues and audiences streaming into Bridgeton from Buenos Aires.
I have been working on strands of activity, writing, preparing external conversations and work at Glasgow Women’s Library that focus on values led leadership. It is many things but almost inevitably seems to involve forms of courage. It is easy to believe that in the face of all the work that needs to be done that values led institutions and organisations are failing as a default, the scale of work to be done can feel perennially daunting. I am trying to focus on the bigger picture of progressive movement, seeing progress underway in so many places and knowing the momentum for change is palpable. After a short but much needed break I am looking forward to celebrations and exciting work commitments: it is the 5th anniversary of Vand A Dundee  – and I highly recommend the birthday activities to all, I am very excited to be a participant at the Publishing Otherwise programme at esea Manchester and to working alongside Ella Snell and the second year cohort of Art School Plus participants, but first… a rest.

Reflection: 26th August 2023

conversations, visions, sharing, reading, writing, leadership

I mentioned last week that I've had an overwhelming sense of Guilt About Missing Out (GAMO?) on this year’s festivals offer. There has been a truly uplifting glut of exciting and interesting things happening in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and across the country this summer, so most of which I have regretfully had to miss – I plan to remedy this next year. Happily I did make it through to the annual Momentum gathering hosted by British Council and Creative Scotland. It’s always such a boost and an honour to be able to participate in this twin stranded initiative; an annual hosting of international leaders involved in visual arts and literature programming. Having had the pleasure of welcoming a visit of a cohort of visual arts directors, programmers and creative representatives to GWL recently I was pleased to be able to head through to Edinburgh to meet with a host of truly inspiring representatives from literature organisations. The array of visionary, committed and innovative thinkers and the formidable festivals, publishing, gatherings and initiatives that they are developing was astonishing. A contributor observed it is clearly critical to understand that it is people, individuals and groups who create literature, literature organisations and festivals – it is their collective effort and in many cases their will to collaborate, share and learn from each other that keeps these resources relevant and alive. This gathering really underscored this idea of how remarkable people give rise to incredible resources, to innovative ideas and to truly life changing and life-saving work. All the delegates were remarkable and all the projects are ones I will be eagerly following but I wanted to note the work of Seçil Epik, an Istanbul based, queer feminist leader, who is involved in several brave and beautiful cultural projects, including Queer Waves ; a queer DJ collective that is partying as a political act, and Umami Kitap a collaborative project she cofounded in 2020 a timely, vital project that is (re)publishing in translation, some classic historic and contemporary international queer texts in Turkish. 


The cover of Yakut Oram, Rita Mae Brown (RubyFruit Jungle, 1973) published by Umami Kitap in Turkish 43 years after it was first published.

I know enough to appreciate the risks involved in undertaking this work and feel humbled and inspired by these initiatives in a context where currently and sadly the rainbow flag and Pride are banned. It was moving too to hear from Yuiilia Kozlova, the director of the International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv. As the Momentum panellists were preparing to speak bulletins were coming through of the latest waves of attacks on Kiev and Yuiilia spoke of the otherworldliness of being in the context of the gathering with war being waged at home. She spoke eloquently about the efforts she and her colleagues,Ukrainian book lovers and festival goers have endured since the invasion by Russia, (Yuiilia has, astonishingly managed to stage the festival despite the ongoing war Post Covid), describing the festival as ‘about joy and power’. Such cultural initiatives feel like political, poetic and powerful acts. I was illuminating to hear from Govinder Deecee about the development of the Kerala Literature Festival, not just about the phenomenal mechanics of managing a literary gathering at such scale and with such ambition, but how Kerala, a state that had undergone a very specific ‘identity crisis’ following the hiatus in 1947-57 had incubated a form of cultural activism that was manifest in extremely high literacy rates and a state wide, voracious appetite for reading and reading in Malayalam, the Keralan language. It was fascinating to learn that the citizens of Kerala can grow a local library from the roots and bid to get state funding to develop it.  The literature festival has become a focus for this enthusiasm; for books, literature, writers and readers with, last year over half a million attendees. I was impressed that Govinder and his colleagues are committed to this ambitious, multifaceted festival to remain free for all. It is humbling and galvanising to learn how colleagues working across the world are supporting change through making spaces for discussions about literature; I was inspired by the energy and achievements of @verbwellington founder Claire Mabey from New Zealand, of the ethical entrepreneurship of David Irianto  – who has generated several groundbreaking initiatives in Indonesia including @greatmind.id and @ideasfestid and as a fan of the idea of German Literature Houses was delighted to meet and hear from a compelling advocate for Poetic Education Karla Montasser, part of the dynamic team at Haus fur Poesie Berlin There was a concensus from colleagues from hugely varied contexts and perspectives about the power of international collaborations, exchanges, translations and interconnections, that talking and meeting amplifies the impact and benefits all. This short but intense visit spurred my commitment to make more of these opportunities to connect with local and global colleagues, and to see and hear more generally during our own festival season next year.



As I was heading home, full of thoughts of the power of the g/local and specifically the courage of colleagues making festivals happen in the most challenging of circumstances I was struck by the poignancy of the Ukraine National Day ‘celebrations’ in George Square.

Reflection: 19th August 2023

community, transformation, spaces, architecture, tastes

The housing initiative that I'm involved in, Raising the Roof is now ready to move into a new phase, of opening up the group.  Our ultimate objective is to give rise to homes from scratch, we want to make a supportive community in the process and in recognition of the daunting scale of the work involved for the current wee team we want to invite more people to be involved who are able to share the responsibilities of getting us to the finish line. At this watershed moment, it felt important to gather with the chief supporters of Raising the Roof, Voices of Experience to help us gird our loins. We had a lovely gathering during the week to mark this stage with laughter, discussion, and a sense of feeling able to shift the project forward in the confidence that we have the support of wise champions. There is always so much to learn and so much sparking of ideas when RtR and VoE meet. One of the gifts that I received from Voice of Experience, co-founder Susanne Ewing at the gathering was a copy of Achitecture and Culture Journal vol 5 issue 3, on Styles of Queer Feminist practices and objects in architecture, a publication she had edited and that I had missed. The issue had invited editors Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk to address 'styles' of queer feminist practices and it was interesting to discover this use of the term as an approach to working and theorising culture. In their definition, styles is the broad spectrum of creative modes of research raising the significance of aesthetics in queer feminist efforts to transform architecture, material culture, knowledge, production and society through ‘world making practices’. They cite queer performance theorist Jose Esteban Munoz who speaks about world making practice that 'labours' to make worlds of transformative politics to create new possibilities. Reading more about styles and the idea of questioning and identifying gender nonconforming experiences of architectural space and taste and other orthodoxies of style maps into concepts I was exploring in my doctoral research on fashioning specifically the hierarchical logic of good or bad subjects/tastes. I was thinking more about when these ideas were first developed in my own practice and recollecting the work I was embarking on during my MFA at GSA when myself and Janice Kirkpatrick were starting to hatch the idea of Graven Images in the early 1990s. It was this idea of disrupting binary gender divisions that was absolutely at the root of my practice and research approaches at that time. I am delighted to see these most recent waves of related thinking and enquiry and it is fascinating to see this work reaching such a developed stage and being made manifest in architectural practices now.


An architectural gem at Bridgeton Cross lost this week.

The jurnal issue includes an appreciation and reflection on the importance of the work of Suzanne Lacy including a review of a restaging of Lacey’s International Dinner Party (the focus of a chapter by Elke Krasny) in Stockholm in 2016. Lacy's practice is a fascinating as well as influential model. Some years ago I was fortunate enough to be a participant in a Suzanne Lacy led project in collaboration with On the Edge Research in Scotland called Working in Public. One of the critical things that I took away from that collaboration was hearing about Lacy's understanding of herself as an artist activist, within a milieu of other feminist activists from the early 1970s on who have gone on to manifest forms activism in various fields whether that was politics, the legal profession and in her case art.  Learning more about  Lacy's longitudinally practice (her research project was focussed on the many years of continual focus on working with communities in the Oaklands area of California) led to my rereading my own practice in Glasgow Women's Library and starting to think about this, my own practice as another form of a collaborative longitudinal artmaking; something that I have at intervals reflected on in my practice and found to be a helpful perspective especially when there are challenges and periods of ‘stuckness’. The festivals and the cultural offer is starting to peak in the metabolism of established Scottish cultural life. I didn’t have the means or the awareness in earlier decades spent in Scotland to ‘do’ the festivals, it came late to me. Now I feel a desire as well as a responsibility to see, hear and do things. So many groundbreaking programming seems to be happening, notably the Edinburgh International Art Festival that Kim McAleese has led this year. I had the great good fortune to have been invited to be a guest programmer for the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018 (thank you Nick Barley) and am excited at the prospect of Jenny Niven taking the reins as the Festival moves into its next phase of development from 2024. It is critical for cultural organisations to be shifting always in the direction of values led working, equity and ethics and it feels like this imperative has reached a tipping point as tensions become more stretched between values and corporate sponsorship, ethics and commercial imperatives. I am keen to see how the established Scottish institutions manage these conversations in this paradigm shifting time for the sector with all the opportunities as well as challenges that stepping into this offers up. New approaches are beyond urgent for supporting, conserving and developing culture in Glasgow and Scotland; notwithstanding the complex issues of representation, repatriation, climate emergency related concerns and inclusion. All this as sobering cuts are underway on many fronts not least for museums colleagues.  (Today I set aside some time to show solidarity with those protesting outside of the People's Palace in response to 30% cuts in Glasgow museums sector...) Any appreciation of the culture needs to be tempered by this recognition of precarity and the for discussions on all registers that lead to positive change.

Reflection: 12th August 2023

tension, shifts, reorientation, embodiment, seasons

I am aware that I am holding on to several strands of life and work that are pulling in tension. I've been trying to keep an equilibrium of a new rest and relaxation regime whilst making headway on a range of pressing tasks; ensuring that a compulsion to make space for exercise and stopping work doesn't ironically become a burden. The shift in seasons has been a noticeable backdrop to being in the annual thick of reviews, applications, reports and appraisals. Some overcast mornings and glowering evenings it feels like summer is spent and there is a sense of subtly changing existential pressures on us at this time as another year passes the orientation point into autumn. A quote really struck me from Alexis Shotwell (Practicing Freedom: disability and gender transformation) as I was thinking about tensions and weights, about the things we are set to do, the things that we're doing and the drag of the past. ‘But as we're engaged in the work of feeling the weight of the past and trying to remember it well, and as we work with the complexity and impurity of the present, time flings us on. The future is coming for us or we are coming for it, and so it matters how we collectively set our course. Remembering the past for the future and deciding how to respond to entangled coconstitution alike invite us to have reasons for choosing one thing and not another.’ Shotwell asks, ‘How do we determine what kind of future we want?’ In the midst of (seasonal) reflection and questioning I'm grappling with all the different strands of life and work and a form of Guilt About Missing Out (GAMO). At this time of the year in Scotland if you are employed or involved in the cultural sector there are very many things that it suddenly feels critical to see. Many of my colleagues and friends have spent a lot of time bringing their work to fruition in festivals and programming working across an array of arenas, literature, performance, visual arts, museums and I want to be there to witness, enjoy and support. I feel like I have missed many creative boats in 2023 whether that’s due to pressures to make headway on my book, the labours involved in trying to make a future home for myself and, or a bulge in work and life tasks (both focussed on Strategic Planning and intensive future focussed thinking and actions). A break is overdue as I am having to remind myself that I am a physical being, that there is a responsibility to be literally embodied in the world, to feel embodied in all these processes. To practise freedom, as Alexis Shotwell suggests, might reasonably be an exercising of our own liberatory mental and physical prerogative to not to feel the weight of pressures to do, make and act but to ensure we are listening and seeing too. A beautiful filip to flagging energy and gusto this August has been catching some bits of the Women’s World Cup despite the best efforts of broadcasters not to treat it like…well, a football World Cup. I have been rattling through notebooks this year and my current customised one for Feminist Leadership and Website has a lovely accidental synchronicity. 

Reflection: 5th August 2023

paying attention, hope, endurance, resistance, respect, people power


A week of pipers, protest and powering up.

I have been consciously placing my attention on hopefuelling things this past week; focussing on what I want to grow in my thinking. I find I can often click into the positive and stir action through contemplating works by feminist creatives. This week I've been spending time looking at sublime, enduring, prescient works such as Yoko Ono's TV to See the Sky (conceived in the 1960s there have been iterations extending into the 2020’s). This is a work that germinated in a context where Ono was living in a space with no view of the sky and made a work that has brought the sky literally, politically and metaphorically into focus in a profound way for millions in global contexts. I discovered with joy whilst contemplating this work this past week that in an iteration staged in 2021 was by the wonderful @feministcenterforcreativework an organisation that I admire and had the opportunity to visit during my Clore Leadership Fellowship.
I admire feminist leadership and art that wrangles rage well, for example, through biting humour, a trait exemplified by writer @monaeltahawy. I highly recommend following her, subscribing to her newsletter and checking out her Substack publishing; all display forms of her trademark ‘global resistance to patriarchal fuckery’. Her recent posting is a characteristic round up of the infringements to women’s rights and feminist responses to oppression in global contexts including: Peruvian Women Wigmakers, Afghan women learning Judo over WhatsApp, the first queer Tamil collective outside Sri Lanka, Assam women fish workers vs climate change and women-only cab services... Respect Mona, this is just the stirrring stuff the world needs. It was through Mona’s newsletter that I discovered the @khateera_ project. Yet another example alongside @havenforartists of the brilliance, creativity and endurance of Lebanese feminist activism. Khateera uses a form of satirical mockery that deftly critiques the pomposity of Stuck Leadership (recognisable across the globe) that needs to be robustly called out.


Closer to home it was wonderful and uplifting today to catch a fantastic local resource RENEW (Recovery Empowers North East Women) on the march today in Beyond Barbie Pink with a piper leading the way (see image at the top of this blog). It is the season to have random encounters with pipers. I can feel in my waters the build up of the World Pipe Band Championships that will be gathering on Glasgow Green soon. I love this time of year when the hoopla of the perennially disappointingly male dominated TRNSMT festival is out of the way and when gradually every other person I pass on my daily constitutional is a deeply focussed, practicing piper. I love the surreal sensation of immersing myself in the unique cacophany and spectacle produced by hundreds of bands rehearsing and marching simultaneously in public parks, with the epicentre being a 5 minute walk from me. The overhwleming dissonance of hundreds of pipes is an acquired taste but one I have developed over the years. We are still two weeks away but pipers can be found drilling as far as Kelvingrove Park. I feel like I have already spotted my favourites, the tight, impressive and super cool drummers and pipers of the St John’s College Pipe Band of Zimbabwe (competing in the Novice Juvenile Bank Group B of the competition). They have star quality - you heard it here first.

Reflection: 29th July 2023

retreats, time, space, crafting, rebel, librarians

I have had the benefit of three wonderful visits to @Cove_Park. I have been lucky enough to have been invited to two of their legendary dinners and towards the end of my Clore Leadership Fellowship I made sure that I set aside some days there for my first ever retreat experience to absorb all the learning from seven months away from @womenslibrary. Those days have fuelled me for the years that were ahead, helped me weather the Covid Years and allowed space for formative thinking around feminist leadership.
The second dinner I attended was this past week and I felt more aware on this occasion how significant it is to have the luxury of space and time and the right conditions, ideally, as here, in nature, to brew ideas, to connect with others at a pace that one can manage well and to open up in a convivial unstructured way to new thoughts and ideas. The journey itself to Cove is magic (I prefer to take the ferry from Gourock to Kilcreggan to really appreciate the gear change and pace slowing). This time I shared the ride with a fellow invitee @SoizigCarey. I had last connected with Soizig in the somewhat overwhelming circumstances of us both being guests on stage at a @TheGuiltyFeminist gig at the Glasgow Pavilion. Siozig was there as a representative of Scottish Refugee Council, and I was there representating Glasgow Women’s Library but on the short ferry ride, I discovered that she was a jeweller and learnt about her feminist and ethical approach to this craft. A chapter of my PhD focussed on a women’s pleasures in self fashioning and how class issues of taste determines readings of consumption and uses of jewellery and I am a lifelong fan of bling so this was a lovely connection for me and a chance to chat about the politics of adornment.


Intermediary, (2018) one of the works by Louise Hopkins exhibited at Cove Park.

At Cove I reconnected with friends, colleagues and new acquaintances. It is always inspiring to be in the company of @anitaec71 and have the opportunity to hear more about the fast changing world of dance, movement and choreography fromher and from Vânia Gala, Head of Contemporary Performance Practice @rscofficial. @alexiaholt_ is the best of hosts and we were treated to a moving sample of Shuggie Bain in Tamil, and a memorable meal, a vegan ‘toe to tail’ by chef, Lydia Honeybone. I had the great honour and pleasure of being seated at dinner next to @lowlamichelle. Lola is a great writer, thinker and activist and another guardian and champion of feminist libraries, specifically @thefeministlibrary in Peckham. It was hope-fuelling and affirming to hear from Lola about the committed work taking place in one of our sister libraries and to find so many fruitful points of connection.
Happily for me, my visit coincided with an exhibition at Cove of a beautiful new body of work Double Flower, by @louise_hopkins with an evocative epistolary new text to accompany it by Sarah Tripp. Having begun the journey to Cove discussing the significance of jewellery, it was serendipitous to encounter Louise’s work Intermediary (2018) and after the visit I discovered more work by the artist that I hadn't been aware of that spoke to me and my research interests in profound ways in particular Mum (Gold and Black) (2008)
Having the space and time for synergies, synchronicities, and ideas to converge and seed is why spaces such as Cove are vital and why there should be more opportunities for all to retreat, pause, think, make work and connect. Cove was the incubation site for Raising the Roof (Janice Parker and I starting a train of post dinner musings some four years ago on a specific set of 'what ifs...' that has led to publications, podcasts and hopefulling homes...).  It is miraculous how, even with a short period where you have the permission to think in ‘retreat mode’ thoughts and then actions can germinate, life courses change and things manifest. During Clore I laid out the first iteration of my Feminist Leadership Toolkit and I am looking forward to seeing what grows form this most recent visit.
This past week I was delighted to discover the Borrowed podcasts created by colleagues at @bklynlibrary another haven (in a building of civic architecture splendour) for people to find themselves and that I have loved visiting. I caught a recent episode called Pathways to Leadership that underscored how far even the most welcoming of libraries have to go to ensure that they are representative. I was also delighted to note an episode devoted to the Luddite Club, a teen group that meets at the library and for whom media and smartphones are not working. Finally, a colleague passed on an online resource that I wanted to share too here, Rebel Library is curated by radical librarians and has a host of great reading recommendations around climate and ecological emergency.

Reflection: 22nd July 2023

emotions, energy, dandies, listen, attention, sounds, spaces, people

I've been managing a sort of heady brew of emotions having had lots of nourishing social connections over the past couple of days connecting with friends old and new, elders and young people and although I have been feeling grateful and uplifted this time has been shot through with some melancholy about rapidity of the passage of time and the ongoing sense of horror at ghastly news bulletins; as fires rage in the Medittereanean, with fascism on the rise in Spain, the omniprescent evidence of the deficit of ethical leadership globally... and then as I walk through Glasgow noting the distressing decay of the city scape and a sense of twinned inertia, existential dread and disillusion in the cultural community. When I get a chance to speak to people of my own age, as I did this weekend, I am conscious that we are more likely to speak longingly about the past. I don’t think this is merely solipcism or nostalgia. We are marking change and regretting the loss of qualities about experiencing the city that were generative. We remember living in Glasgow of the 1980s and 1990s as a time characterised by the groundswell of creative energy, in fashioning, music and art. We have memories of a particular sense in the street, student and club fashions of idiosyncratic, uncommodified, pre designer, unpredictable, politically dissident, punk infused dandyism. Unique manifestations of creativity and anarchy were pervasive. It was in vivid contrast to the ungentrified architecture, the unreconstructed post industrial, dour landscape, the lack of cash, the absence of any of the stores that are now generic. I miss this... and in my conversations with young people this weekend, I drew an impression that their worlds are inconceivably different, freighted with world weariness, a reasonable cynicism borne of fake news feeds and the ubiquity of slick, saturated imagery and instagrammed, ironised ‘experiences’. One friend went so far as describing our times as The End of Days. I want to acknowledge both the privilege of having experienced the (real)life that I have had, whist also attending to this sense of disquieting doom that we can all increasingly easily feel prey to whatever our age.


Beauty and bounty in the Fruit and Nut Orchard, Alexandra Park.

I've been taking some solace in seeking out and discovering small, quiet spaces and places that confer a sense of hope, from the food forest at Alexandra Park that is just about to reach it's wonderful fruition. Created in 2016 and planted up by the local community I have watched it mature into a blissful acre of calm, abundnace and joy. Similarly, I have loved spedning a reflective moment at the Tiny Forest that appeared during lockdown and has grown steadily in Glasgow Green, each new green space and tree planted can convey a sense of hope. In the somehwat forbidding and daunting landscape there are still the green shoots of singular arts initiatives too. The modest @listengallery in my neighbourhood has been quietly offering a space for art, creatvity and new thinking for the last few years, and happily weathered the pandemic years. Today, walking past, I heard a distinctive sound emanating from inside and as I tentatively opened the door I was greeted by a bubble wrapped gallery worker. I had stumbled on The International Listening Biennial. The Listen Gallery is one of the sites across the world that are making space for sounds, in this case a bubble wrapped poetry workshop led by Colin Herd, entitled, reasonably enough, Sound-Bubble-Wrap. This beautiful, random encounter illustrates well what the Listen Gallery and the Biennale aims to do, to foreground ‘the ecology of attention inviting a shift from paying to giving attention’. Surely communal listening spaces are what we need now...? Regardless, it is always uplifting to come across this ineffable type of energy and imagination, to encounter things that people have brought into the world, making something magical and communal and creative in a locale and important to cherish and appreciate the people and places who make it happen.

Reflection: 15th July 2023

green oases, cutural justice, humour, freedoms, selfhood

It's Saturday the 15th of July and this week has been a long one with quite intense work at the start of the week and then a visit to London for the tenth anniversary of Art Fund's Museum of the Year awards. I am noting that I need to prepare for London trips with proper care to ensure I avoid overstimulation, minimise overloading my diary and seek out green oases where I can. On this visit it was lovely to discover a community garden (with excellent low slung Segal Method buildings) that was new to me, in Camden, the Calthorpe Project saved for local people by campaigners in the mid 1980’s and find it thriving.


A welcome message from the Calthorpe Project, Camden.

It is five years since GWL made waves as a Museum of the Year finalist (the first equalities focussed museum to make it to that stage) and there's been some movement on lots of different registers from representation and reparations, leadership and equity in the sector in those ten and five year time spans. There is undoubtedly still so very far to go in terms of the deep paradigm shift that is required to fully address the knotty issues of historical and contemporary museum relevance and cultural justice and for the wider politics of the museum to be fully unpacked. However change is unequivocally underway and this gathering over and above the celebration of Finalists it was a great opportunity to connect with friends, allies and colleagues old and new who are playing their own parts in museum make overs and cultural resetting including Laura Wright from the Postcard Museum, Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah the Co-CEO’s of Birmigham Museum and Art Gallery, the CEO of the Museums Association @Sharon_Heal, the wonderful CEO of Clore, Hilary Carty, @thefoxonline, Director of the Bowes Museum, and @sallysarahshaw of @firstsitecolchester.
More museum discussions followed on the evening of my return to Glasgow convened beautifully by writer and academic, Roxani Krystalli. Roxani invited me to be in conversation about ‘Collecting with a sense of space’ with @sarahALaurenson of National Museum of Scotland. It offered an opportunity for me to hear insights and learn from Roxani and Sarah and to think through and share thoughts around space and place and the relationship of museums and museum objects. It is always an illuminating exercise to reflect on places and objects that forge our identities. I'll make sure and I can link to the film of this gathering when it is made public and I would encourage anyone interested in the power of place and links with creatvity and culture to catch the events in Roxani’s wider Growing Roots programming. 
I have felt more like my reading world is expanding again. This week, I experienced satisfying and dramatic shift of gears from being immersed in the worlds conjured through the interlocking, satirical, subtly nuanced, mordant short stories by Katherine Mansfield and into the astonishingly well written Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser (the scary monsters here are racism, misogyny and ageism) that are in their own brilliant way also fusing dark humour with profundity.
I’m recording this having come back from Glasgow Green and this year’s Pride. It is 26 years since I attended the first Scottish Pride and there are so many reasons to feel positive and grateful for the changes that we have witnessed in that period;  in levels of acceptance of queer lives and freedoms gained but yet again, there is so far to go in terms of the deep, profound hearts and minds, social, cultural and political shifts still required. Deep discriminations prevail, and as I noted in my last blog, including the fact that so many places in the world are becoming more not less hostile to freedoms of expression. Self-surveillance and the normalised suppression of selfhood is still a thing whether in regards to public displays of affection, surpession of selfhood in the workplace or the lack of queer friendly care homes.


Shelter’s placards at Pride highlighted the consequences, including homelessness that can still follow coming out, or being LGBTQ in rented housing.

I had contested feelings as I popped into a local supermarket on the way home from Pride; the rainbow bunting and the playlist of 'gay' anthems felt baldly cynical; part and parcel of the rank commodification and corporatisation that is in lock step with rising levels of queer ‘tolerance’. But I do appreciate (having known things to be so different) that there is this degree of social ‘tolerance’. Inequities remain, there is no scope for complacency and a wide spectrum of discriminations exist but freedoms and gains have been made that are hopefully. as Prides come and go, less and less likely to be recinded.

Reflection: 8th July 2023

planning, passions, prioritising, awareness, wisdom, calibrations


A find from today’s visit to Voltaire and Rousseau.

It's Saturday, the eighth of July and as I mentioned in earlier blogs I have been doing some planning that extends into the longer term exploring how I want to live and show up in the world. I'm trying to incorporate all the strands of my life, my passions, needs and priorities and construct a routemap of sorts. I am in the process of identifying the tasks and actions that might bring me closer to my goals but at the same time reading about how planning needs to be held in tension with the importance of being present in and attentive to the world. I am grappling with the idea of relational awareness with people and the wider world whilst experiencing the Fertile Void and mapping my life into an uncertain future. In the past I have thought myself incapable of planning for myself and that this is indicative of some sort of personal shortcoming, but I’ve been thinking about an extract from Jay Oren Sofer’s Say What You Mean that offers another perspective on why we might feel chary or inhibited about life planning. Sofer says, ‘we can plan and strategize all we want but how often do things unfold in the way that we imagined?... If we become fixated on a plan, we lose touch with the moment and when that happens, we'll lose access to wisdom. Our ability to respond appropriately to what is actually happening becomes clouded by preconceived ideas about what we think should be happening. When we plan, can we recognize our ideas for what they are a tentative imagined future.’ In discussions with trusted friends recently, I felt able to calibrate some of the planning that I've been doing to allow for braiding of these formally discrete strands; the activity of imagining a future and the necessity to attend to the moment. My friend, podcaster, broadcaster, writer and coach Ramaa Sharma recently advocated creating in my planning ‘a deep berth for spontaneity’ and I have found this hugely helpful in being able to adjust plans to be both focussed but general, incorporating reviews and deadlines whilst flexing around lived experiences with an openness to be able to respond to creative and collaborative opportunities. I want to stay anchored to a sense of how I want to be in present and how I want the future to feel. In recent weeks and months I have noted a heightened quality of uncertainty about the future and fear of the unfathomable in discussions I have had with students and other cohorts where young people predominate. A question that regularly arises is whether or not to work within ‘the belly of the beast’, to contribute to bringing about change in the mainstream cultural organisations or to focus their attention and time in the countercultural . They harbour hopes that the momentum for change is unstoppable and will accelerate to the degree that they feel able to bring their whole selves to their work should they choose to be agents for change in the mainstream, but many are fearful that change will be glacial or superficial.  A dilemma for some is whether to trust to the uncertain processes of making new organisations and institutions such as GWL however difficult this is when resources are so few and the tensions between communities are onerous to manage. I feel like this characterizes this sort of paradigm shifting moment where the uncertainties and permacrises of late seem to stretch out into the future and imagining ourselves navigating it with our values foregrounded is deeply troubling especially for who are embarking on careers specifically in the cultural sector (a topic that Jemma Desai has spoken and written  about so eloquently). Students and young people seem increasingly reflective and I am hopeful they will generate the answers we need to shift the empasse.



Qualities of relfection, deep questioning and accountability were in evidence in a gathering I contributed to at the end of this week in a discussion with student interns and staff at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum project. At the end of our session one participant asked about how we can remain positive and anchored through challenges and churn. What a critically important question; maintaining hope and energy can mean a project survives or implodes. From my own perspective music can shift the mood and galvanise me to action (I was thinking about this earlier today when I was listening to Sampa the Great ) but also how returning to particular texts that are records of past struggles for change or discovering new writings or podcasts by deep ethical thinkers or movement organisers can bring a sense of joy and inspiration. Immediately before meeting with the Smithsonian students I had had that sense on reading Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s anthology Quiet and specifically the remarkable poem, Dreaming is a Form of Knowledge Production, and I was able to share that recommendation immediately. After the session I remembered too how second hand bookshops have given me a lifetime of meditative, joy fuelling episodes. They never fail to offer me a distraction from the every day, and have been a source of inspiration and happiness as well as a deep pool of life changing ideas. I have visited second-hand bookstores around the world but it is hard to beat Voltaire and Rousseau; what an evocative, wonderful and strange place; idiosyncratic, and a marvellous evocation of an eccentric facet of Glasgow and thankfully, as I discovered this weekend an oasis that is still with us...


A flavour of the delights that await at Voltaire and Rousseau.

Reflection: 30th June 2023

justice, connections, openness, perspectives, thought leadership, equity

This is a time of year when, pre Covid, I might have been thinking about when I could next make a journey to Italy so it is more than distressing to read news that makes me feel that this may be yet another country that is now off limits. It seems unfathomable that in Padua, a place that I have visited fairly recently that around 300 women have had to enact a sit-in outside the city’s palace of justice on Friday, after a state prosecutor claimed that the birth certificates of 33 children born to lesbian couples were not legal.  The idea of the State looking to strike a mother's name from the birth certificate on the basis of the mothers sexuality is appalling. When I was a young woman I believed unequivocally that the world was inevitably going to be opening up to myself and to my younger brother and sister and the generations of young people to follow, part of an unstoppable, progressive momentum where people connecting across nations would be made easier and more affordable, that global understanding would accelerate and human rights and world peace be advanced in the process. It is profoundly regrettable  to think about how the world has been, in fact, shrinking as a result of right wing politics criminalising people for their identities, inhibiting movement and self-expression for people within and visiting countries where retrograde politics prevail. This is coupled with the ways that austerity delimits travel for many even to those countries that remain progressive. The politics of hate that circumscribe the free movement of people and persecute and demonise migrants are beyond contempt.
Travel to Europe and America when I was a young woman was both relatively affordable and safe. I knew travel was a way I could widen my mind, learn about myself and others and change my perspective. When I was living on benefits as a young woman I managed to make it to Amsterdam to camp on the outskirts of the city just to feel my worldview expand for the short time I could be there. Thinking about our responsibilities now in the micro and macro to help shift the tone of discussions from violence to compassion from insularity to openness across all divides I was reminded of a quote by Rosenberg, who in 2005 stated, ‘I use nonviolent communication to liberate people to be less depressed, to get along better with their family, but do not teach them at the same time to use their energy to rapidly transform systems in the world, then I'm part of the problem. I'm essentially calming people down and making them happier to live in the systems as they are.’ I am re committing to this endeavour, to be thinking about the interconnections around mindful communication that link the interpersonal and the political, the local and global. In my work at Glasgow Women’s Library, I've been thinking with colleagues and Board members more about how to make resources more accessible (obviously) and, how to explore feminist approaches to things like induction and recruitment, and all of it rooted in a belief in active listening, discussion, transparency around decision making and having courage to ‘stay with the trouble’. With this in mind it was instructive yet again, to connect with the thought leadership of Jemma Desai. On Substack Jemma is in conversation about accountability and film programming and expands this to indicate where the knotty issues are more widely in our cultural practices, about how privilege, access, decision making and transparency is difficult to achieve for those that are involved in values led work, and how, of course it can be abused and mismanaged. So, for example, Jemma reflects on her experience directing the Berwick Film Festival, and the efforts made towards ensuring equitable access around the film submissions process (and specifically how the implementation of a second opinion for submissions was an intentional step towards equity) but in a typically frank and helpful way she asks the question, pragmatically, do we have the resources for honesty and transparency as cultural organizations? Jemma is a beacon for those of us trying to fathom a way forward in cultural organisations (and our own lives) and the expansiveness of her thinking is illustrated in this most recent podcast offering where she keynotes at the And Festival.  I was particularly struck by the ambitious telescoping in from the personal to the pan global, and the questions Jemma raises about the origins and problematics around the idea  of ‘charity’ in the cultural (and wider?) sector. I am left as ever thinking about the issues raised for days and weeks ahead and grateful to have these questions opened up as I attend to my own work.


On an uplifting note, I was thrilled to attend the launch of the GWL Net Zero Handbook last night and just awed by the work of the GWL green cluster. This group of colleagues have brought about an remarkable free to download handbook, commissioned from Dress for the Weather. It felt like change was in the air with the main events space fulland with colleagues, volunteers, local councillors, activists, community organizers, speaking about our shared ambitions, our progress and seeing it in terms of an albeit slowly shifting but nevertheless real movement for change in political, community and organisational contexts. 

Reflection: 24th June 2023

workflow, lifeflow, planning, prescence, future, options, risks, utopias

It's Saturday the 24th of June and this is the 24th week of blogging this year and we are one day after the longest day so perhaps this watershed time is having a bearing on my thinking and working this week. I am noting having had a sequence of conversations that are about flowing into the future. I am looking critically at workflow and life flow and facing up to and grappling with possibilities and opportunities of the future and for the first time in my life in any structured way really starting to map what might lie ahead (with equal doses of sanguinity and optimism and realism and knowledge of the uncertainties that we live with). I am continually working across many planning processes and project managing in my professional life, with some projects at a fairly daunting scale. In stark contrast I am not practiced in actively charting the possible future course of my life, of being active in a planning process. Having taken a deep breath I am now in the saddle with this and reflecting as I get more involved just how much action there is in a life planning process - so many tasks, so much research (!) and realising so acutely my shortcomings and lack of knowledge and so grateful for all those I feel I could turn to in order to gain the mainly pragmatic knowledge I need. Life planning, I am appreciating unsurprisingly requires answering some major questions about what I want and need. I am discovering, on the basis of my life lived so far of what might be enough; what might it feel like to have enough time and resources to be able rest and relax, to have enough of the same to take holidays when I feel they are needed, to make enough money or be bartering skills to the degree I need not be worried and to be comfortable and to feel a sense of being properly remunerated (or exchanging skills and knowledge equitably) when I am working, in whatever capacity.  I know this is something I am coming late to in my life and that many people (have had to) think or worry continually about nothing else. To the degree that this is possible for me, I want to have enough control of the pace of my life to make work into the future as manageable, creative, meaningful and rewarding as possible, to have the opportunity to feel excited, energized and productively challenged in my life, to work and play and to be able to centre the things that I identified some years ago now as being core components in my Good Life Tree (this exercise was the first vital step in taking some focussed control over where I spend my time and where I place my attention I mention it in my blog of 29th July 2022 and readers, it is still going strong!) I want and need a settled base, to work from create in and retreat to... and of course the list goes on...Adding complexity and challenge and as I articulate each statement (that requires some courage in itself) is the weight of the inequities in the world (for me in a relative way and for so many others in much more profound forms), whether around housing, insecurities around work of all kinds, or the stifling, enervating deadening hand of capitalism, and of course ageism dogs the process. I am at a stage when this, life planning feels like an imperative new adventure, that could be fear inducing or exciting and I am opting for feeling the latter. In the process I am choosing to read these ‘obstacles’ as ‘options’. (Thanks to A this week for this insight).


David Goldblatt’s ‘Periodic Table of a Feasible Utopia’, the core of a public art installation in Bristol.

Faced by the scale of opportunities, risks, social, cultural and economic limitations and global inequities (!) I revisited the beautiful and profound piece of work Goldblatt has made around feasible utopias and wishing the world was as he has imagined.
I am currently energised by being fully in the process and full of anticipation for what the days and weeks ahead will bring and grateful to be sensing change happening.  I feel grateful to have people who I trust to be empathetic, enthusiastic, supportive and interested enough to be walking alongside me. Grateful too to now be able to say the things that I've not felt entitled to say in the past - to say, this is what I need to be able to live without worry and to know that these are things that everyone should have: a sense that one can for example go to yoga classes to have retreats (or respite) in order to reorientate, to be able to garden and grow food, to feel safe and secure and be able to actively participate and serve others into later life. These are big thoughts and to lay down plans around them and grapple with questions of mortality in all of it is a significant endeavour for me. In the meantime, I am feeling inspired by witnessing some of the brave transitions that people in my friendship and work communities have undergone in their own lives (so many more so and so much more dramatic since Covid?) and how this focus on the North Star (so often involving care of self and others) seems to result in benefits for us all.

Reflection: 17th June 2023

international interactions, books, translations, guided walks, kinship, friendship

I love the distinct qualities of the Saturday shift at GWL. It is a day that seems to draw a higher number of new visitors and offers more of an opportunity for giving longer tours, and having more relaxed conversations. One of the other benefits of being a staff member on Saturday Front of House duty is experiencing a form of reverse librarianship.  People visit for very many reasons; on ‘pilgrimages’ to a rare resource, popping into a building that looks interesting, to revisit a library first used as a child, to research, read or see shows to meet up with friends or donate books or items for the museum or archive collections. Many come to browse and to take out and, or bring back books and its these books that often end up becoming recommendations from them to me to read. Today was no exception, so now Lesbian Nuns; Breaking the Silence (a classic from 1986 that has had its place on the GWL shelves for decades but that I have never read…) has, on the basis of the chat with a borrower been added to my must reads and Soviet Milk a bestseller from 2018 from a Latvian writer Nora Ekstena, that had passed me by. This is a novel that considers the effects of Soviet rule on a mother and daughter, about forms of endurance when existential pressures are applied that impact on a person’s professional and familial relationships and sense of self.  I am discovering the publishers, Pierene too. I love works in translation and thanks to the enthusiastic praise of our borrower I have discovered that Pierene have been quietly specialising having published works from 25 countries in 20 languages. The Times Literary Supplement have described them as conjuring ‘Literary Cinema for those fatigued by film.’ This is a form of imaginative creativity I feel I need just now as ‘box setting’ and streamed film consumption peaked for me during lock down and my fiction reading in particular has been sluggish of late. GWL’s beautiful edition of Soviet Milk is one of those gems that librarian Wendy Kirk and our remarkable longstanding volunteer E has either managed to source for free from the publisher or some kind person has donated. Another lovely aspect of Saturdays at GWL is the influx of first time visitors and during the summer months many are arriving in Bridgeton from across the world. Today I had the pleasure of touring three really lovely people from Milan who had found their way to us. There is always something to learn from these encounters, gaining insights on how the land lies for others in their different contexts (more nuanced, complex, first-hand accounts rather than for example, the invariably unreliable impressions picked up through social media or news reporting). At the start of the week I was invited to talk about my (feminist) leadership adventures and share some items in my cultural work toolkit with leaders from the Western Balkans this illuminating encounter was bookended  on Friday with a meeting with two colleagues both researchers based in Glasgow, Ruth and Katherine, who are feminist leaders themselves talking about the profound questions of the moment, and how there might be through ‘joy in gender’ (one of their research specialisms), a pathway from precarity and peril to radical futures where compassion prevails.


These past weekends have been full of happy moments. I am still feeling the glow from last weekend, reconnecting with my beautiful brother and the last wave of celebrations of my partner's 60th birthday. The birthday celebrations culminated in a led walk by another remarkable feminist and walk leader Gabrielle who took us gently and gracefully on a wonderful new guided adventure, and unexpected swim on Arran. The sun shone, rainbow flags greeted us as we alighted from the ferry in Brodick, nature was abundant and it was a totally restorative day of kinship and friendship.

Reflection: 9th June 2023

moving mountains, ethics, libraries, innovations, values, futures


Christopher Kane, Be Open to the Joy You Deserve, V and A Dundee.

A third trip to Dundee in as many weeks, this time to keynote at the annual CILIPS conference. CILIPS are the library profession’s champions. I really appreciate the ways that the small CILIPS team move mountains to support a sector that has felt increasingly imperilled.  It was stirring to be speaking to and with a packed gathering about how we might reckon with the deep threats and challenges of today whilst opening up to a radical and hope fuelled future, one where libraries have a profoundly important role to play as one of the few remaining civic, free ‘commons’ spaces. Some of the sessions I caught at the conference were evidence of the imagination, creative and deep thinking and future focussed commitment in the sector. For example Dominique Walker introduced us to a new vital innovation in Open Access for the sector and wider world. The library-led initiative the Scottish Universities Press is a bold, not for profit, open access intervention into the field of academic publishing addressing the notorious exclusivity of this market. Recently I was astonished and disappointed to see a great sounding book A Handbook of Feminist Governance (– arguably essential for me to read as someone involved in this specific research area and in my work more generally) being launched and promoted but at an exorbitant price, frankly outside my budget so inexcessible to many more. I have missed out on others in the recent past including Gender and Feminist Leadership for the same reason (still retailing at over £300...) The GWL can of course ask for reveiw copies (the way we manage to source some new texts) but the Scottish University Press is surely a project whose time has come and speaking to Chair Hannah Whaley there is clearly huge goodwill and appetite for this to succeed.  I came out of David McMenemy’s session feeling similarly illuminated and excited.  His presentation, Towards a Values Driven Advocacy for Libraries in Scotland persuasively laid to rest any remaining notion that there is scope for complacency around library neutrality and mapped some of the other urgent challenges (and opportunities) we face as a sector such as getting fully to grips with censorship, privacy (in the digital age) misinformation and disinformation, calls to decolonise and the costs of access. I left the session recommitting to grappling with the complexity of ethics in my own working contexts. I am eager to see the fruits of David’s work that will include useable and shareable videos and other research outputs to be published later this month. My beloved and awesome colleague, GWL’s first and only librarian Wendy Kirk was up for the CILIPS Librarian of the Year award but sadly missed out, I wanted to recognise her here as someone who embodies humility and compassion and yet has quietly made a massive contribution to the profile of libraries in Scotland in her years at the helm of the library collection at GWL following years in the public and school library sectors. She has shown courage and innovation, developing ambitious international collaborations, pioneering a feminist classification system, the first in Scotland and her remarkable mentoring and modelling of what feminist librarianship looks like…I learn from working alongside Wendy each and every week and she is unquestionably worthy of the title Scotland’s Librarian of Year.

Reflection: 2nd June 2023

celebrations, feminist continuum, family, partnerships

On Tuesday, I was in Dundee again for a VandA board meeting and to celebrate with the staff their remarkable achievement in bringing about the Tartan exhibition and took the opportunity to spend time at McManus and DCA where the welcomes from all staff were warm and I discovered so much in terms of art, history and fresh perspectives on the city.
This past weekend there was a fantastic streamed and IRL event at GWL featuring two excellent speakers DM Withers and Lucy Brownson. Supported by GWL 3 Decades colleagues Mae Moss and Rachel Gray, DM and Lucy gave two brilliantly researched and illuminating talks on the theme of feminist pre digital organising. DM focussed on the span from the early 20c exploring the ways feminist publishing enabled women across the world to communicate and agitate for change through publications such as Jus Suffagii. Lucy explored the histories of feminist organizing of Black women's activism and second wave feminist work drawing on her deep knowledge of the Lesbian Archive collections at GWL .  It was a brilliant aspect of the launch of the amazing GWL Origins: pre digital exhibition community building exhibition.


In the early years of GWL I developed an idiosyncratic classification systems for a cuttings collection. For many years a team of us volunteering at GWL maintained it and a cutttings resource. Some of the files are now on display as part of the GWL Orgins: Pre-Digital Community Building exhibition.

Today, a shift of gears as I re connect with my relatives in Kilsyth. I try to make an annual trip to see them as the family takes part in Scotland’s Gardens Open Day, but this had been the first I had made since Covid. I was as grateful as ever for the kindness and good conversations in adbundance and to be sitting outside in the sunshine in a truly awe inspiring garden.  My Kilsyth kin are inspirational; self-effacing to a fault, they have prodigious skills, many in evidence in the planning and execution of the Open Day. My invite arrives each year in December and by the time the day finally arrives the delivery of the event is like witnessing a beautiful well-oiled machine: there is a dry stone walling demo, a children’s trail,  the catering bothy is legendary, teas, coffees (and wine!) and home baking is magnificent, and there are lovely gazebos, garden chairs and plenty of perching spots across the most incredible of gardens to sit, chat, and enjoy the spectacle. A burn flows through the whole and this year in the great weather the huge volume of visitors were treated to Alan, Alison and Gayle’s customary warm and wonderful hospitality. The garden is dramatically landscaped with hydro turbine, hives, bridging across the burn and each year more to be amazed by in terms of planting. Their garden (and its neighbour up the road, Aeolia, that is similarly astonishing) speaks volumes about my Kilsyth clan’s core values and principles, ingenuity and hard work. It was a truly uplifting visit. I returned home laden with cakes and homemade jam made from the plum trees and raspberry canes in the garden and huge admiration for the environmental and community benefit the gardens have wrought in their neck of the woods. 



The week ended with a really joyful, happy celebration of 30 years of partnership, an anniversary marked by sunshine, good food, joy and gratitude. A newly discovered sound by Go Go Penguin Everything is Going to Be Alright, really captured my mood this week.

Reflection: 26th May 2023

pausing, thinking, sharing, re-connecting 

This week has been hugely active with non-stop multi-tasking with funding application deadlines adding extra degrees of pressure. On Thursday however I had the chance to pause and present to the Plus Tate group; their annual gathering was at DCA this year. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to road test some thinking and writing I have been doing related to feminist leadership topics, to acknowledge the context of 30 years of GWL, the permacrises and its impact on the cultural sector.  I was keen to share my thoughts about resilience, endurance and what there might be for the mainstream arts institutions to learn from counter cultural and fugitive cultural resources globally in a context of escalating demands on the wider cultural sector to repair both themselves and ‘shattered’; communities. There were some great colleagues at the gathering, and I happily spent some quality time reconnecting with Sophia Hao, the inspirational Director at Cooper Gallery, Dundee, Viviana Checchia, newly appointed Director at Void Gallery, Derry, Tiffany Boyle recently appointed Head of Exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Art and Sarah Munro, Director at Baltic, Gatehead and Fiona Bradley of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket. It was great to get to know some new colleagues at Tate Liverpool and make new connections with Gabriela Salgado the recently appointed Director at Show Room, Heather Peak-Morison, newly appointed Director at DASH and Xiaowen Zhu the recently appointed Director of esea (formally the Manchester Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art)  – a resource I have been visiting for three decades. There was real synchronicity being reminded of the Chinese arts centre of the past as we staging a small tribute to the work of Pam So at GWL just now, (an artist who regularly showed at the Centre) as part of our ongoing 30th anniversary Heritage Programme. 

Reflection: 19th May 2023

heritage, historicising, preservation, conservation, cyberlife, endurance, resources

It is a fascinating experience watching the new exhibition at GWL being developed by the ‘Three Decades’ team. In the early stages of the project it became clear that colleagues working with the GWL collections were keen to develop a recreation of some of the pre-digital aspects of the GWL history, displaying some of the material culture and conjuring an evocation of the early space/s. [image, links] Reflecting on predigital technologies and approaches to working are a theme that I've spoken about in this blog and watching this physical manifestation of aspects of a space I remember come into being has been both evocative and thought provoking. It has thrown up questions and thoughts about time passing and about one’s own historicising! Surely this is a rare occurrence for anyone, being able to even partially re inhabit a space reconstructed from the past.


Detail from GWL Origins: Pre-Internet Community Building exhibition at Glasgow Women’s Library.

The curators and archivists have made the space beautiful, including a poignant reinstalling of a prescient work by Pam So, a friend and a brilliant artist who is still sorely missed. I remember our first premises were aesthetically lovely (if humble, pulled together through skip finds and DIY in extremis…) They paid homage to our influential trailblazing, idiosyncratic sister libraries in Germany but otherwise were like no other libraries I had come across… but they were also cluttered, filled with roll up cigarette smoke (guilty!) and cold most months of the year; by comparison the current (re)presentation is serene and pristine . As time passes I feel increasingly aware of what a revolutionary time those of my age (born in 1961) have lived through. The shift from analogue to digital has informed every aspect of my own creative work, involvement in information technology, activism, collaborations and collecting. It is astonishing to me from the vantage point of now normalised cyberlife to have grown up in a home without a TV or telephone of any kind, without a car, without a shower, central heating and to have undertaken my whole school and Higher education without using computers (happily I did have access to one by the time I embarked on my PhD!) and to have worked in an organization that functioned  before the internet or social media had been invented. It's increasingly fascinating to reflect on how technologies have impacted on every facet of my life and work.


Detail of cuttings card index cabinet, GWL Origins: Pre Digital Community Building exhibition, Glasgow Women’s Library.

Another cause for reflection was hearing about the private gathering last week at GWL to mark another milestone, two decades on from the start of a project that I contributed in small ways to called LiPS (Lesbians in Peer Support). It was the first GWL funded project and the first project of its kind for young lesbians and bisexual women in Scotland. As a peer education and peer support project it can now be appreciated as succeeding in its very essence; the remarkable group members have sustained their support of each other for over 20 years. It struck me forcibly once again of how far in time the ripples of impact can extend, from actions taken with no thought of the future but a focus on real and urgent needs to be met. It is humbling to have worked on projects that however tangentially have contributed to lives being supported and changed and I am grateful for how these early projects (and all that have followed) have been formative and impactful for me in their turn. I have found processes of (co)production are always reciprocally learning processes. I know I was changed by the LiPS project and feel hugely proud of the ways that the group members have grown as human beings and are leaders and pioneers in their own right. Certain conversations, certain encounters, chance meetings, and friendships, random creative connections have impacted enormously on the way that I think, behave and understand the world. The fatefulness of small funding applications being successful (or not) or resources being found or deployed voluntarily and how they can lead to impacts decades later seems important to recognise. The relative lack of funding then and now for so many worthy projects is sobering to consider since it severely limits the potential for life changing, horizon expanding work to be undertaken. Fate (lack of political will and bald discrimination) has determined, sometimes so casually, projects failing to take root, collapsing or surviving. Projects such as LiPS (funded through two rounds of Comic Relief funding) galvanised friendships and forged enduring support networks and I am grateful that this was the first stepping stone in funded projects for GWL to take courage from and build upon.
This past week involved an unexpected trip to the Barras. Although it is on my doorstep I rarely make time for a wander round. For many years this was a weekly ritual but now visits are infrequent so I was thrilled to see this beautiful, precarious resource thriving. The market is clearly still needed, still relevant and it was cheering to see new young folks making it their own such as Panda. I heard with sadness that my Mum’s local market is closing –many of the ‘market’ towns’ are now market less for the first time in hundreds of years. For the abundant value they bring markets need to be cherished and supported.


Barras aesthetics: marbled panel from the facade of Barrowlands market.

It was joyful to be at the launch, a sort of renaissance of another local resource. The West Boathouse on the Clyde at Glasgow Green is a landmark on my running route and I was proud to work with Rachel Gray from GWL on an Equalities programme with the Boathouse team as part of the now completed capital development.  Ingrid Shearer who has been expanding community engagement has co-produced a really lovely publication to coincide with the Boathouse’s relaunch and I am excited to see the river thronged with new rowers over the summer.
I wanted to give a heads up and warm congratulations to a friends’ new podcast series on authentic leadership. Ramaa Sharma is doing an amazing job spotlighting the complex and personal ways that people have developed their own forms of endurance in leadership roles in journalism across the world. 

Reflection: 13th May 2023

coaching, learning, social enagagement, activism, collecting

 
This past week has been something of a watershed. I am keen to move up the gears with my writing projects and had the chance for some productive discussions with critical friends and absorbed some gems shared by Heather Parry of the Society of Authors. I was staffing at a workshop on publishing rights that Heather, the co-author of the brilliant, free Illustrated Freelancer’s Guide was leading. I feel like the shape of a publication with rafts of associated working and sharing is starting to coalesce. This year, I feel like I have gained a small but hugely impactful wee support crew that is really encouraging me to gently but purposefully corral a now sprawling Feminist Leadership programme of writing, teaching, coaching, workshopping and training into some strands of sustainble work. I am hoping spending time on understanding better what I need and want to do will hopefully result in ways I can disseminate ideas and expand discussions more effectively. Issues of leadership arose productively in an interesting gathering I was kindly invited to participate in at Edinburgh College of Art midweek hosted by the Parity in Practice Research group. It was an honour to be on a panel with the Director of Edinburgh Art Festival Kim Aleese and artist and curator Sekai Machache and to hear from students and staff discussing engagement with communities and what forms of parity in practice we want to see in the cultural and academic sectors. It was fascinating to note that the three of us had prepared introductions to our work that articulated the specific ways we choose to work (and lead) with others and it struck me that this is in stark contrast to convention; cultural leadership approaches are rarely specified or articulated. I welcome this turn to transparency and a tacit acknowledgement that we all have a choice to work in ways that do or do not acknowledge our power and to interrogate any sense of there being an unexamined  ‘norm’.  It was cheering to hear the way that some students are now talking not just about being ‘socially engaged’ but about values-led practices. On Thursday I spent the day as one of two invited speakers (with freelance writer, heritage practitioner, trans awareness trainer and academic Kit Heyams) at an event hosted by University of Nothumbria that brought together archivists and research librarians interested to discuss issues of gender complexity, trans inclusion and engagement. There were fascinating take aways some welcome (re)connections and a wonderful tour of the remarkable Tyne and Weir archives stores. The largest civic collection outside London with 12 miles of shelving it was fascinating to be able to handle even a fraction of the items from this most amazing archival treasure trove. The public and academic discussions this week around ethics, activism, gender, the reinscribing of lost identities into our collections and approaches to leadership and engagement was wide-ranging, thought-provoking and valuable for my own independent creative endeavours.

Reflection: 5th May 2023

focussing, shifting, positive psychology, optimism, empathy, growth, change


Graffitti, Dublin.

After such a short immersion in Ireland and island life I have nevertheless felt my focus shifting, I am encountering nature in a new way as if through a loupe and noting how much I have been thinking about, feeling the benefit of and drawing on energy from this latest Nature Fix. In an associated way I have been considering the importance of optimism in my living a (feminist) life. I am a critic of 'stuckness', prone to exasperation at naked injustices that seem only to proliferate and be increasingly brazen. I understand that living as a feminist is in and of itself a life lived with inevitable degrees of (sometimes overwhelming) dissatisfaction not to say rage but I know too that I am an optimist. Listening to a podcast discussion between Laurie Santos and the ‘man who invented happiness science’ positive psychologist, Marty Seligman this week I was left thinking more about the part that optimism plays in sustaining hope and in processes endurance such as those I have been involved with at Glasgow Women's Library and more generally in feminist working. Recently, my pal Charley Barker encouraged me to explore more deeply the psychology of feminist leadership; what are the characteristics and conditions (beyond the material and scope of privilege) that help foster a sense of dogged endurance and optimism in the face of  the stark reality that the vision of equality will not (ever) be achieved? I am grappling with all that this entails and what my work and that of other feminists tells me. I know several feminist archivists and museum founders, who, like me have been involved in equalities focussed projects for decades who epitomise for me these twinned qualities of endurance and optimism.  Far from ‘bed blockers’ (just one of the ways their work can be negatively characterised) their positivity and commitment to visioning the future in their work today requires digging deep and building anchoring foundations.  It occurred to me that over the last few years, as I age and as the permacrises have escalated that I sense a shift to cynicism, fear and pessimism, and how existentially challenging it is in this specific sense and at this time in our lives and in history for those of us who are optimists. Optimistic approaches to living have been challenged at a fundamental level as hope (for fairness and equality to prevail) diminishes or seems to be futile, and how a once secure belief in the future leading to improved lives for all and progressive ideas gaining momentum have become deeply equivocal. In fact, I'm finding myself at the end of this week, when there have been plenty of reasons so feel sad, disappointed and where there is a seemingly insuperable pull towards conflict, thinking somewhat perversely why not redouble my commitment to optimism, in people, and their power to bring about seismic change?

Helen de Main, Admirers Look On, 2012, Screenprint, 46.5cm x 32cm

As I'm speaking and writing, I am looking at a print by Helen de Main that has for many years hung above the table that I eat at, play games on, meet people around and it still conveys a calm, clear and unwavering call to a form of personal and political action, to be optimistic as a duty to myself and others. Some of the work I have been doing with young people outside GWL recently has been galvanising this renewed pledge to be hopeful - it is humbling to encounter intelligence, empathy, openness to learning and critically, deep compassion in people who are embarking on their professional journeys as creatives and gratifying when they signal to me, as an elder, that there is something to be learned for them in our conversations and that respect is reciprocal. One of the tools I am keen for them to have, that I wasn't taught and didn’t learn as early as I needed it was about understanding and burnishing our core qualities and conversely being brave around stepping into the challenges, the areas where we have work to do that lie on the opposite side of the ‘core qualities quadrant’. Their bravery to do this vital work that leads to a better understanding of our strengths and weaknesses encourages me to resist my own ‘stuckness’ and try to both ‘stay with the trouble’ and take pleasure from the knowledge that I am growing and changing.
At the end of the week there was a joy fuelling treat in store to spend time reconnecting with a friend whilst spending time at Jasleen Kaur's remarkable exhibition, Alter, Altar at Tramway. I can only marvel at the ways that artists of her calibre can, when faced with a space that must seem so dauntingly vast, imagine and then execute something so beautifully conceived, so multi layered (sonically and physically) so funny and melancholic and such an evocation of spaces and places, local and global beyond the gallery. I can't remember a show where I felt so awed by the way that sound pieces worked so well within an environment.

Reflection: 28th April 2023

tidelines, foraging, memorials, trees, silvo-pastures, bookshelves, eco-feminism 

The wonderful tidelines of the Lambay trip are still evident in my day to day – I am thinking differently about what I eat and what I can find to eat and drink foraged on walks.  Gorse bushes, beech hedge leaves, dandelions and nettles all seem transformed through knowing more about how (lovely) they taste and how much I benefited from even a short period of a diet that was made up in part of their intense flavours and health giving properties. Back home, my local daily nature fixing usually involves some time in Glasgow Green. Each year on or around 1st May, International Worker’s Memorial Day is marked here by a small band of dedicated folks some of whom I have known for many years. These are activists I regard highly as having led principled and admirable lives.  Their powerful and poignant installation appears quietly on the Drying Green near the former Templeton carpet factory building where 29 women died when a wall collasped on a weaving shed in 1889, killing 29 women workers with many more were injured. The memorial made up largely of aprons adorned with records of the places and names of those that have died undertaking their work hang along the washing lines grows each year. I am grateful to this group and others that sustain this important annual memorialising. 


This year’s installation by those marking International Worker’s Memorial Day have added customised hi-vis jackets to their exhibition at the Drying Green on Glasgow Green.

Returning from Ireland I have felt productive, positive and energised possibly, as a result of an increase in my iodine and iron levels consumed on retreat last week and the restorative joys harvested on Lambay. My appetite to learn more about nature, about foraging and seeking alternative ways of consuming is fired up so I was grateful to have an apt podcast recommendation from colleague, friend and feminist leader (and walk leader!) Gabrielle Macbeth, aka Skylarker. The Accidental Gods podcast is built on the optimistic premise that ‘another world is still possible, and that together, we can create a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. Our aim is to provide the tools we could ever need to understand the potential of this moment – and ourselves within it.’ Gabrielle, a tree champion herself recommended an episode entitled Trees, trees, trees how we can grow food within around and on them  it is a fascinating introduction into silvo-pasture and agro-ecology and a vital listen for understanding about the relationships between all forms of agriculture and the part trees need to play in mitigating Climate Emergency.
The return to work was also cheered by the arrival, while I was away, of the mobile Feminist Exchange Library that is currently ‘in residence’ in the events space. For whatever reason, discovering new bookshelves whether as in this lovely welcoming mobile library resource or the idiosyncratic collections in the homes of new pals, holds a special allure for me. It has been lovely to have lunch breaks that involve browsing and discovering new gems many of which offer up hopeful (eco) feminist solutions to the perma-crises.
I was sad to have missed the launch of another inspirational colleague, Farzane Zamen’s album, Maral while I was away but what a thrill to hear the fruits of her labour… a triumph and a recommended listen.

Reflection: 21st April 2023

nature, learning, wildness, bounty, sensory, experiences, memory

I'm recording this a little bit later than my regular end of week blogging because I've been on an adventure, traveling to Dublin and then on to the island of Lambay. Last year, one of the trips that made a deep and lasting impression on me was a mushroom foraging session led by Matthew Rooney near Inverness in October. It encouraged me to explore more retreats organized by Monica Wilde and, as it was my partner’s 60th birthday, a retreat with Matthew and Monica in Lambay for a rewilding retreat felt a suitably exciting gift for someone I know to be opening up rather than closing down to new tricks. It was joy to be back in Dublin and Lambay is a truly magical place. The foraging, the food, the company, the sea swimming, and the sublime accommodation in such an awesome setting was absolute bliss. I have been an avidly following Monica, Matthew and awesome chef Christine Krauss on Instagram since reluctantly sailing back to reality. The things we learnt (how to become more self-reliant and knowledgeable about (free and readily available) foraged food that is good for our bodies, minds, and our environment couldn’t feel more relevant as we all confront the now omnipresent ‘weird supermarket culture’. Empty shelves, flavourless unhealthy or costly foodstuffs, escalating and unsustainable price hiking and all the deeply troubling impacts of food consumption seems inevitable in the context of climate emergency and in a Brexited Britain. The conviviality, the mass of knowledge shared generously, the unforgettable new tastes experienced and being somewhere with no cars, surrounded by the sea on all sides, bright stars at night and an abundance of nature was intoxicating. This was a retreat that was both relaxing but where we learnt so much with lasting impacts. I discovered first-hand how to cook lobsters using a bonfire, salvaged bricks, a pit and seaweed on a secluded beach – the experience and the taste - unforgettable.  Following our mushrooming adventure last year, walks in the wild have slowed as the ground rather than just the horizon became more of a focus. On this trip the sea, seaweeds, harbour walls and rock pools are now revealed to us in so many new ways, as places of seasonal bounty. The standout tastes of Lambay; the harvested ore weed lasagne, sugar kelp crisps and discovering, barely half an hour after arriving, the ‘truffle of the sea’, Pepper Dulse. Monica showed us how and where to harvest it from along the harbour walls and we were able to savour it in the form of dulse infused butter served in individual shells ready to be spread over hot rolls speckled with gorse flowers. To have the opportunity to be swimming in the same harbour two days later and to experience the beauty of the seaweeds from another watery vantage point was a dream. From laver balls and nettle teas to therapeutic laughs with new pals and the surreality of wallabies abounding around us on awesome walks – a total multi sensory tonic.


Uncovering sandpit cooked lobsters from the beach in Lambay.

Reflection: 14th April 2023

space, time, writing, creating, courage, belief, hope

Thinking about work done and undone, about the space, time, encouragement, resources, emotional and financial support and personal courage, self-belief and determination needed in order to create and make, write and think (a time-honoured feminist trope). I am acknowledging the formidable barriers for self-supported creatives alongside gratitude for the capacity I have managed to carve out with trusted critical friends. In the wake of a recent uplifting discussion and sharing of ideas my companion described this as our ‘rope of hope’ towards manifesting creative projects.
Here are a random wee swatch of reading currently underway that is sitting alongside and fuelling my thoughts:

Kin to these years long silences are the hidden silences; work aborted, deferred, denied – hidden by the work that does not come to fruition.
Tillie Olsen, Silences

Compassion Fatigue
The patriarchy (ugh) not only affects us directly, but also causes indirect harm to us as we care for others. When we experience stress on behalf of others, we may dismiss it as inconsequential or ‘irrational’ and ignore it. Givers may spend years attending to the needs of others, while dismissing their own stress generated in response to witnessing those needs. The result is uncountable incomplete stress response cycles accumulating in our bodies. This accumulation leads to ‘compassion fatigue’ and its the primary cause of burnout amongst givers, including those who work in helping professions (many of whom are dominated by women- teaching social work, healthcare etc.)…
Burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski

The time available for leisure, sociability, speaking and listening seems to be shrinking the time expended for labour, and social networking constantly expends. In short work never stops and networking never stops. If these non-stop regimes govern life it will be at the expense of devoting time to open ended and open minded processes without apparent immediate gains or returns. Conversations belong to the latter. Therefore they might appear expendable. Conversations are meandering. They are filled with turns and detours. The pleasure in conversation lie in not having a clearly defined objective. Conversations transgress the logic of evaluations and benchmarks.
Finding time for conversations of resistance, Liza Fior, Elke Krasny and Jane da Mosto in Feminist futures of spatial practice eds. Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson, Ramia Mazé


Newly discovered shoe tree, Alexandra Park, Dennistoun.

Reflection: 9th April 2023

demands, endings, beginnings, momentum, docking

This past week has been about holding two deep ideas, of endings and beginnings in tension. 2023 has begun with an ask to ‘grieve and grow’ simultaneously. Increasingly I have an impression of myself in a slow but steady cleaving from deep identifications, with Women in Profile and Glasgow Women’s Library, with Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art and other formative identifications with places, spaces, organisations and communities and understaind this as both naturally occuring, forward momentum but with the ‘growing pains’ I have mentioned in earlier blogs. I am both  discovering new landscapes and understanding and seeing the familar with new lenses and from different perspectives. I have been thinking about some of the aspects of the Mitchell text Gracie Bradley brought to my attention recently and specifically how those of us who understand oursleves or are perceived as having leadership responsibilities might do our best work and what dynamics are vital to consider, how might we fuel ourselves and understand better the value of our tacit knowledges whilst respecting and hearing the needs and perspectives of others. I was recalling again the observation that Linder Sterling made of GWL during her residency of the Library as vital ‘a docking station’ - I was so pleased at the time that an artist who I admired so much might make this analogy based on what they felt about the space we had created but also, now, asking the question of myself, where does a docking station get its own energy? An irony of the 30 years of GWL reflective project for me has been the realisation of the continuity of precarity and that complacency, or degrees of comfort and confidence around our space, our funding, our being able to endure has never been a luxury I have felt we could fully afford. The fragility of women’s resources and women’s libraries in particular was brought sharply into focus with the news that the Taliban have forced the closure of our sister organization in Kabul. A question perennially facing us all is how can we best mobilize around these tragic losses and threats to freedoms for women across the world, what do we do with the knowledge of the appalling threats being experienced by people locally and globally by all those enduring persecution and acts of violence. Accepting that we fail each and every day is a sobering, deeply challenging, frustrating, angering and demoralising aspect of values led practice. It was valuable to have the chance for another peer meet up with CB and to be able to discuss navigating the endless churn involved in feminist leadership at this time in history. CB always brings fascinating insights and excellent sources to bear, this time a raft of great questions about the psychology of feminist leadership and recommendation to read Encountering Feminism:intersections between feminism and a person centered approach. What a luxury to benefit for someone else’s considerate and kind highlighting.



I am trying to keep attuned how very small things tiny things can shift your sense of hope. And this week, I took a great deal from seeing a very humble and beautiful tree planted by some of us in the library to mark the passing of a valued friend finally budding. Just last week the buds were imperceptible and I took great solace in a cold and somewhat dispiriting week from this evidence that things shift. The wee tree has weathered the worst of the winter, is oblivious to political, social perma-crises and is doing its thing in this beautiful way. More hopeful symbolic shoots were to be found at the week’s end. Having contributed to several talks, panels and courses across arts institutions over the past few months I am noting how students are increasingly focussed on the in/capabilities and need for our cultural institutions to speak to the needs of people and to model the deep changes that we need both in terms of addressing the catastrophic climate emergency and to step up the demands of being truly relevant. In the face of this existential ask it was an honour to get a chance to talk to two colleagues from the new Smithsonian American Women’s Museum. This is a somewhat improbable connection between a small women's library resource in the east end of Glasgow and colleagues who are trying to forge a relevant, new, ambitious museum resource drawing on the millions of items housed by the Smithsonian and allied museums for access by communities in US and across the world. But it was so encourageing to discover touch points and synergy in so many facets of our work; a rare and cherished instance of ‘dual docking’  and knowledge exchange acrss the Atlantic across the Atlantic. 

Reflection: 1st April 2023

complexity, reckoning, demanding, restorative, anchoring, weaving, compassion, demands, celebrations

I am managing demands whilst tired and acknowledge the need for a deep, restorative rest even after a holiday break. Sensing that this year may be a tough one with the pace back to the relentlessness of pre Covid Times but little chance to press pause on the asks and demands in order to fully comprehend and acknowledge the perma-challenges of which the pandemic was a part. I am learning, still painfully at times, the periods when I am in need of anchoring and re-orientating and, in the process, trying to keep compassion for myself and others foregrounded. Happily there are moments of joy to be had… this week notably in the form of the V and A Dundee’s Tartan exhibition launch. I was grateful to have an excuse to dress up and dance, to meet lovely folks from across Scotland and the world and toast the efforts of a team that have been working tirelessly over many months coming to fruition is such a brilliant way. The show is beautifully curated and there was such a palpable wave of goodwill at the launch and of course radical tartan wearing in abundance! I felt so proud as a newish V and A Board member of colleagues responsible for bringing together an exhibition that defies expectations, weaves disparate perspectives and challenging and illuminating ideas about culture together in relation to this, the most iconic of textiles with remarkable creative exuberance and expertise. It is an evocation of the ways that objects, material culture and museum specialisms can sit alongside and be informed by the complexity of identity and other politics. Episodes of collective celebration around creative endeavours are vital and bring me hope and I am grateful too for the ways that support from different quarters (from creative conversations and the sharing of new ideas) can help change the chemistry. I felt this this past week when Gracie Bradley a GWL Board member passed on a deeply thought provoking essay by Maurice Mitchell that landed for me at exactly the right moment. I really appreciate, as at no other time, what compassionate board members can do in their support of managers of organizations striving to be change makers, with all the complexities inherent in any sort of meaningful work we might aspire to do with and for others. In turn I am endeavouring in my own experiences of Board work to learn and lead with kind intention. 

Reflection: 26th March 2023

discovery, visits, milestones, stretching, summer


Detail of carving, headstone, Lewis

I am recording this on Sunday, the 26th of March the day when British Summer Time begins, and although summer in reality still feels laughably remote just now I do sense that change is on its way. I follow with delight the assiduous documenting of the seasons of lovely Wes of @zinc-house and noted a phrase he used recently to describe the fickleness of this month, Maart roert zijn staart literally, in Dutch, ‘March stirs his tail.’ It wonderfully evokes March’s cuspy nature, a sense of a reluctant movement forward (and some ambushing retreats in wintriness) but movement forward nonetheless. I am deeply affected by the darkness and light, my mood changes dramatically as the lighter days lengthen so March can often leave me scunnered by false dawns. Despite high winds and March stirring its tail it's been incredible to be able to visit Lewis and Harris again this past week. It wasn't my first visit, but it was for my Mum whose birthday we were celebrating. It is always illuminating seeing a place through the eyes of someone else experiencing it for the first time, in this case, the awesome spectacle of Luskintyre Beach and the Callanish Stone sites (especially since we were able to visit them all alone). Joy too to discover so many new places together. I loved our walk around the Butt of Lewis and to discover the amazing, Black House Museum. An unexpected synergy occurred when I was discovering something of the history of this remarkable village; I came across an image of some of the women who were a part of the community. Many years ago, a wonderful friend from Lewis gave me a tee shirt adorned with an image of these very women. It is one of those garments that I can’t shed as it is associated with this act of kindness and friendship and the image is so enigmatic and powerful. In fact, this is the image, of these women on this Tee shirt that features on my Twitter profile. Lovely to discover that I had accidentally making a pilgrimage to their home.



Another highlight was having the opportunity to have my first sea swim in a beautiful bay just a few minutes walk from where we were staying, where the beach was sandy and empty, the waters were calm and the skies were blue. At this ‘cuspy’ time I felt cheered by the thought that if I could happily swim now then there would hopefully be many outdoor swimming opportunities ahead in 2023. I passed another Covid Times landmark this week getting back into the swing of yoga classes in real life. I have been practicing yoga most mornings for many years but missed during the pandemic the learning to be gained from being in the room with a good teacher and whatever ineffable things occur when stretching and breathing in a room with others.  My recent discovery of the work of the amazing Jessamine Stanley has further encouraged me to embrace what body positive yoga practice, alone and with others can offer.

Reflection: 17th March 2023

mums, festivals, international women's day, life, dark skies, activism

Surfacing out of a thankfully short but nevertheless gloomy period of illness and grateful to be on the road to recovery. On my first chance to stride out I headed to see one of the beautiful and uplifting matching artworks created by Rabiya Choudhry for libraries in my locale. I am thrilled that one adorns the facade of Glasgow Women’s Library but it was lovely to be greeted by this one in the foyer in Dennistoun lending library.


Illuminated artwork by Rabiya Choudhry, Give light and people will find a way (Ella Baker), Dennistoun Library.

Always finding it rewarding to mix a purposeful pilgrimage to a piece of art or visit to a great, beloved tree, discovering a great piece of graffiti or stretch of water into my daily walk regime. I am preparing to head off tomorrow to Lewis and Harris, part of a celebration of my mum's 80th birthday with the perenially burnished hope to see the northern lights but regardless, catching the last of the this year’s Hebridean Dark Skies Festival. My parents were always inquisitive and actively sought out art, music, literature and dance although opportunities to develop their exposure to culture was circumscribed. I hugely benefitted at an early age from their bringing so much love of life, travel, reading, music and other cultural experiences into my world beyond the social and class expectations and norms of the time. They cut the cultural pathways for me where so few had existed for them. No one in my family had had the opportunity to go on from school into higher education although my family on both sides are prodigiously smart. Their courage and determination to find a way into cultural slipstreams made it easier for me to do the same, to fight for my own access (whether contigent or otherwise) into cultural spaces and places. In a recent blog, I shared one of the badges that my Mum had donated to Glasgow Women's Library and I wanted to add that as well as being a badge donor and a badge wearer she's been a badge designer and maker (and as these badges attest, an activist to boot). These are some from a series that she made (pre digital technology) for the Bellevue People's Festival in Manchester in 1978.



They are now a cherished part of my own idiosyncratic button collection. At that particular time, in the late seventies our activist and music passions began to converge and I have happy memories of us both being on Rock Against Racism demos and of Mum taking me to some landmark punk and reggae gigs in Manchester and Birmingham. So, Happy Birthday Christine and thank you for the part you have played in my radical cultural and political education. March is forever associated for me with ratcheting up the props to mothers; on International Women’s Day, celebrating my own Mum on her mid- March birthday, and (notwithstanding the consumerist hoopla) saluting her and mother’s around the world as they grapple with all that that mothering entails on Mum’s Day.

Reflection: 11th March 2023

milestones, art, collaborations, donations, imagination, peace

This week, the week that contains March 8th, International Women’s Day, has been one of the busiest times of the year in my calendar for decades. Each day is a day of work towards the goal of gender equality working at Glasgow Women’s Library and in my work outside GWL, but this is the time of year when the ask of us/me from external partners and mainstream organisations becomes especially intense. However, I managed to catch some really wonderful exhibitions and participate in some great conversations in amongst the busy days.  It was sheer joy to see two artists that I've worked with over the years and whose work I hugely admire; Mandy McIntosh and Helen de Main showing at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art. Repeat Patterns is a must see (Elizabeth Price’s spectacular Slow Dans is also still showing until May at GoMA and again, well worth a visit). I was teaching at Edinburgh College of Art , contributing to the Cultures and Politics of Display course during the week and managed to catch the lauded Poor Things exhibition at the Fruitmarket. I enjoyed having the opportunity to spend a productive 24 hours with staff and Board members of V and A Dundee in my capacity as a fairly new Board member, there is so much to look forward to in terms of programming and strategic vision as this museum shifts into its 5th year. Some weeks ago I was filmed in conversation with Iagan MacNeil for a series of videos for the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This resulting video was launched as part of the RSE’s own International Women’s Day celebrations, and to round off a busy week I had the opportunity to be live in conversation with Lauren Laverne on her BBC 6 Music breakfast show to speak about one of my favourite Glasgow Women’s Library donated items. The selection was a tough call but I choose a favorite badge, one of the many gifts to GWL from my Mum; a Yoko Ono designed, Imagine Peace badge, from 2004 but with a message of perenial relevance and linking back to her anti-war art activism from the late 1960s, when her honeymoon Bed-In became a ‘commercial for peace’. A small object with a powerful message. 

Reflection: 4th March 2023

moments, growth, life, complexity

The public ‘in conversation’ event at Glasgow School of Art with Ingrid Pollard was such a wonderful way to conclude this work week. Ingrid is a brilliant artist, good company and someone with great wisdom and kindness. She was keen to discuss three connected bodies of work; two curated shows by Radclyffe Hall and the No Cover Up show at Glasgow Women’s Library and more generally discuss art, activism ideas of our past, present and future lives, creative collaborative practices. It was uplifting to be in the company of so many smart and curious students and some of the wonderful colleagues that now make up the staff cohort at GSA. Part of the conversation centered on what we expect of institutions today and I feel optimism when I see how the curriculum now includes so many figures and voices that were absent from the picture in past decades. I am also aware that as institutions locally and globally attend more to the complexities of real and academic life, to politics and culture, the weight of doing this work inevitably grows heavier and more complex. So, I wanted to note an appreciation of the fact that alongside the criticisms that I have of academic institutions (and they are many!), I feel that values led practice in these settings is both vital and impactful and recognize that this can be thankless, demoralizing and unenviably difficult.  
Recently so many of the talks and public conversations I have been involved in are to a degree reflective in nature; thinking and speaking about the past and looking with caution, not so say anxiety about what the future might entail. The degrees of challenge in the past can often seem overshadowed where they were trumped by positive outcomes. In fact, it seems inevitable that there is a period of stress, worry and fear that precipitates the most movements forward in the type of work that I regard as meaningful. As further shifts, challenges and turbulence are inevitable I am trying to feel more welcoming of the accompanying ‘growing pains’, sitting with these with the undersatnding that knowledge accrues in the process.


Ingrid Pollard, left, speaking at the Glasgow Scool of Art, March 2023

Reflection: 24th February 2023

gratitude, meaning, trust, differences, soul, justice

It has been great to see so much good content being shared through the Fair Share for Women leadership website and in particular, some really interesting work on feminist governance and also a piece on the theme of trust by Traci Baird of Engender Health. Traci is working on issues of gender sexual reproductive health and rights as a feminist, and I appreciated how frank she is in her article on Trust in Feminist Leadership  about the challenges of working as people with different ethnicities, genders, religions, generations and locales and how she works to develop trusting relationships. Traci notes how trust is accelerated when we can identify our commonalities, our commitment to our mission, our values, and our work and each other whilst sincerely recognizing and appreciating our differences. This might seem as simple aspiration, but in my own experience, even within relatively smaller cultural organisations trust is both critical and can be extremely hard to achieve and maintain – arguably more difficult than in the past as fears, differences, perceptions and expectations can feel acutely fraught in challenging times. Traci cites the work of Steven Covey as helpful in this endeavour. Covey suggests characteristics or behaviors that can help engender trust; behaviours such as talking straight, demonstrating concern, creating transparency, righting wrongs, and showing loyalty. Leaders need to demonstrate competencies;deliver results, get better, confront reality, clarify expectations, and practice accountability. There is a further ask to blend both behaviors and competencies with the intention to: listen first, keep commitments and extend trust. These struck me as clear and reasonable demands that people working together might make of each other as they aim to earn, engender and demonstrate trust.
Some final thoughts. Reflecting on some of the things that I had to forgo and can now enjoy and that bring me joy- I can appreciate so much more clearly that these are antidotes to the processes of ‘burning out’. ‘Burn Out’ is always a risk for me when pressure and stress can feel omnipresent against a backdrop of ongoing turbulence and uncertainty (this week was no exception with the shock announcement of the resignation of the First Minister). The news of Nicola Sturgeon’s decision rippled through the train passengers I was travelling with to Dundee and across the panelists and audience for the talk I was chairing on Queer Spaces at V and A Dundee. I noted how this news brought with it a wave of fears, of ‘what next?’. Progressive politics and (counter)cultural organizing seem so precarious with a sense of ‘shattered’ communities and low reserves and depleted energies in order to hope and push for leadership that will safeguard and build upon hard-won rights . At times visions and hopes for deep, embedded change and equality with secure funding to allow for cultural and social justice can seem remote and the endurance necessary to keep oneself, others and organizations afloat daunting in the extreme; ripe conditions for burnout. How might we best endure? How might we choose the battles to fight? How do we best choose the ways to use our energy and avoid enervation and become ‘shattered’ to the point of defeat? It was helpful therefore to come across extracts in a book given to me this past week by one of my soul sisters, Charley. Burnout suggests ways we can evaluate whether to give up on some on some projects in order to focus our energies on others. I liked the ‘decision grid’ enabling an evaluation of the benefits and costs (immediate, longer term) of quitting or staying the same and the reinforcing of the idea of a life lived with Meaning, (of the kind we make ourselves) of being connected to something larger than ourselves and how this can help us to thrive when things are going well and endure when things are challenging.

Reflection: 17th February 2023

trust, joy, behaviors, rights, aspiration, actions


Detail of the audience feedback, Art of the Terraces, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

It’s been so good for my soul to be out and about seeing things and meeting people in other places this past week; in Liverpool and Manchester and Holmfirth. I have really appreciating art and culture in particular seeing the ways that audiences were enjoying the Art of the Terraces show at the Walker Art Gallery. Audiences were asked to ‘pay what you want’ and it was gratifying while I was waiting at the end of the show to note so many people putting lots of notes into the collection box. I visited the 2023 Turner Prize shows at Tate Liverpool and was keenly paying attention to Ingrid Pollard’s work in particular as I'll be in conversation with her next week at the Glasgow School of Art’s School of Fine Art, Friday event. It was fascinating to see works that Ingrid had made for Glasgow Women's Library as part of her No Cover Up show displayed in such a different context.


I am still relishing the sensation of seeing art in spaces outside Glasgow and to be doing other activities that I was longing to do and could not for so long during the lock downs. I'm still feeling that acute appreciation of being able to back on my favourite running route outside Scotland, from my Mum’s house up and around the hills next to Holmfirth. This was the run that I longed for when travel was restricted and each time I have been able to be back running with the views of hills and valleys I do so with deep gratitude and elation. Another post Covid Times milestone: being back at a live football game. And what a game – a conclusive win at Old Trafford! It was an emotional experience, walking down Matt Busby Way en route to the stadium once more, to be surrounded by fans in full song and to see the players in real life again and at such close quarters. And this time, I had an even deeper appreciation than usual of ‘casual’ fashion in action having been to the Walker show the day before.

Reflection: 11th February 2023

work, roles, impact, visions, action, systems

This week I’ve managed to combine some deep thinking, travel and preparing for upcoming public conversations alongside benefitting from a wave of creative energies, bravery, activism and visionary work of others. At the start of the week, I caught the film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’ beautifully constructed documentary of artist Nan Goldin's life and work. It was stirring to be reminded of what can happen when rage, and vision are combined, in this case resulting in the exposure and uncoupling of links between Big Pharma money and the arts and museum sector, specifically Sackler’s profiteering from the OxyContin opioid epidemic.
I attended the first Clore Climate Summit where there a range of different perspectives were shared on how creative and cultural organizations and leadership internationally are functioning and flexing around another deeply problematic challenge, climate energency.  This is another vexed terrain for cultural organisations involving ethical dilemmas, social injustices and the need for bravery in political and cultural leadership. It is clear that these discussions are now beyond critical and it is all of our responsibility to enact change at the micro and macro levels. As it happens, Immy Kaur was one of the keynote speakers on the Summit panel and during the week I had two further opportunities to hear her speak. Midweek Immy was a panelist at a streamed launch event for the remarkable We can Make Homes housing futures project in Bristol. Melissa Mean and her team have created an inspiring real neighbourhood ‘test bed’ that seriously addresses the seemingly intractable issues of how and where people may build their own affordable and sustainable homes. The panel itself, responding to the We can Make it model was brilliant and unequivocal about the urgency for paradigm shifts in the housing sector (linked inextricably with climate change) and I felt after attending that this demonstrator project a genuine model for any group (including Raising the Roof) who are interested in tackling the complex issues around land ownership, community agency housing, and addressing the sort of issues that are a blight on especially urban contexts such as Glasgow. Melissa Mean conceptualized the idea of small but powerful changemaking models, in this case the two houses built so far (illustrative of the potential for We Can Make) acting as a form of ‘urban acupuncture’. Theirs is a focused, distilled injection of energy, clearly resulting in a deep and positive localized impression with hope rippling out with exponential impact. The week ended with Immy arriving in Glasgow for a public in conversation event with me kindly hosted by SCAN, the inaugural discussion in their Decades series. I wanted to invite Immy to Glasgow because she is a phenomenal thinker and somebody who says exemplifies for me a brave, compassionate, visionary, creative leadership that we need in the world today.


Good news for B16, neighbourhood newspaper part of Civic Square’s participatory civic and social regeneration work.  

We had the luxury, supported by SCAN of hosting Immy ‘in house’ at Glasgow Women’s Library for a day of relaxed but powerfully impactful discussion led by Immy with myself and others discovering more about Impact Hub, and Immy’s current focus Civic Square, 12 years of work and leadership that we have so much to learn from. Another visionary thinker that Immy and I both follow is Farzana Khan and I have her to thank for recently tweeting a link to a recent talk by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson where Wilson speaks about counter cultural spaces as places where we might be ‘rehearsing freedoms’. This concept epitomizes the work taking place in Civic Square and chimes with my understanding of what has been happening in GWL- a rehearsal of freedoms and  rehearsal of possible futures, over the past 3 decades.
Immy was so kind in sharing her experiences of managing the weight of feminist leadership, grappling with the tenacity of oppressive systems of stuckness and where she has enabled traction. She emphasised the necessity of adapting, surviving and changing in order to keep relevant. You can read more about how Civic Square are going about this here. I admire the ways that she brings her whole self to public and personal meetings and to her social media feed. The impact of her visit is lasting on so many of us who had the opportunity to connect. I would recommend a follow @ImmyKaur

Reflection: 3rd February 2023

reciprocity, motivation, energy, conversations

It's finally February, January seemed like a long, challenging and enervating month but having seen multitudes of snow drops and bulbs coming up during a short trip down south last week I am feeling a sense of hope and that spring is finally on the horizon. This prospect, of how we might re energize and feel motivated is in fact a lifelong work in progress for so many of us; more a state of ‘perpetual recovery’ that Joy Francis of Words of Colour has eloquently spoken about. Endurance, exhaustion and how we motivate in the context of working in an unfair world is something that I'm planning to talk about week at an event as part of the SCAN decades series. I try to be aware of the ways I can restore energy especially in the face of work inertia (just one of the lessons I have learnt from Clore CEO, Hilary Carty). As it happens, this week I spotted Hilary using the metaphor of dance to speak in her customary eloquent and embodied way about leadership challenges in Arts Professional  I've mentioned a few times in these recordings/blogs how music has played its part in injecting hope and passion at times when I have needed it to push through and this past week I caught up with Fight the Power: how hip hop changed the world and felt the joy.  I was also inspired and reenergised after catching Stance podcast, back from a well earned break and in this episode bringing brilliant sounds and creative energy from Ghana.
Alongside the upcoming public conversations I mentioned last week I'm preparing for some workshops, discussions, mentoring and other collaborative work with young people and emerging creatives and leaders in different disciplines. I am excited as each will be a chance to have my ideas challenged, new ones formed and to learn.


Monie Love features in the Fight The Power series. I remember my cd of Down to Earth as a source of energy in the year building up to Glasgow Women’s Library being formed in 1991.

Reflection: 28th January 2023

feeling, women, roles, identity, shattered, sutured, focused, nodes, leadership, leaders, demands

I've been very much focused on/mired in the prosaic, the day to day of late, juggling whilst trying to make headway…but I have also made some space for thinking and strategizing this month and this led to some more deeply reflective, focused discussion at the end of this week with others in a UK leadership forum. Managing and attending to the nuts and bolts can so easily become constricting and for years I felt that wider conversations were both outwith my means, my orbit of connections seemed restricted and ‘retreats’ of all kinds were simply a luxury I couldn’t afford in terms of time, cost and capacity. There are still spaces and places that I don’t feel I can easily access but I do try to grasp opportunities for expanding my thinking, meeting others when I can and when opportunitites arise. Inevitably, taking time out and changing perspective results in traction and positive momentum towards addressing dilemmas and in making breakthroughs in approaches to life and work.
A theme that has been resurfacing for me is around patience and slow burning change, rather than burning out and how play feels like a really critical thing to cultivate. Knowing myself and being known as a person who has a passion for play alongside my professional roles is something I have been conscious to carve out for my own good after episodes in the past where I have felt I have been engulfed or tyrannised by work. Reflecting on the consequences when our work defines us or how our association with a campaign or a single issue comes to be wholly synonymous with identity seems a critically important act. It feels increasingly important to me to know myself as a walker, a swimmer, a person who loves to dance and cook, who is a music and nature lover and makes time for all these things, the non work nodes of my identity. I am curious when people assume that my identity is absolutely sutured to Glasgow Women's Library; that I have laid down my life at the altar of work. Happily the distance between these assumptions and how I actually feel is widening. I was thinking about this whilst listening to a recent Happiness Lab podcast episode about the Good Enough Job; reclaiming life . I felt some strong identification with many of the points raised by the author of a related book by Simone Stolzoff about the risks of over identification with our work and it generated some interesting questions for me about finding a sweet spot between bringing one’s soul and values to work whilst recognising work as but a part of our selves. One of the quotes that Stolzoff concluded with is how we can cultivate the ability to switch off, of feeling at peace at the end of the day whilst knowing that ‘the work is not done’, a daily brake on ‘burnout’. Silka Patel from the GWL Board recently usefully raised the importance of developing a Policy of Disconnect (now in the pipeline…) and of knowing when it's time to stop clicking through. I am learning more from my own experiences as others how misinformation and misrepresentation functions in today's often internecine, febrile social media landscape. I have been using the term 'shattered' to help articulate how I am feeling myself, hearing others speak about their relationship to labour and life and it feels increasingly apt to describe the impact of global capitalist and discriminatory, oppressive regimes and policies on communities. I'm observing this especially in the escalating, fractured and shattering ‘culture warring’ and the post COVID malaise. Going into discussion forums at the end of this week I was trying to think about the emerging challenges that I'm facing at this moment of the shattering that goes beyond remedial patching and mending…, and trying to encapsulate it in in terms of the accelerating and proliferating demands on myself and others I am connected with as we try to model values led, intersectional feminist leadership. We are doing this as we find ourselves at the interface between a hostile, fast moving, unpredictable social, political and cultural context where staff, volunteers, boards and service users are being impacted by and feeling relatively shattered by it. I have been thinking about some of the activities that feminists are inexorably pulled into; one is about stewarding traumas and griefs regardless of our skills and capacity to manage these (and thanks to colleague Mattie for bringing my attention to some critical reading on this topic), another is managing expectations in a radically morphing world of work as it intersects with the unfairness of the world we are working within. So I am trying to come to some clarity around that and addressing the ongoing and real impacts of systemic minoritisations and discrimination. Throughout I remain interested in how we might grapple with this in relation to issues of leadership. I am writing around the role feminist leadership might need to play in cultural sector paradigm shifting, from command and control leadership to creating, sustaining and developing spaces for cultural justice to flourish; about the slippage between women leaders and feminist leaders, and to be taking care around that. To be steadily determining and making demands that are around what is feminist about my own practice. This is work that is happily also underway in the women's library and I will continue to seek out in settings locally and globally.

Reflection: 20th January 2023

discussion, spaces, friendships, learning, opportunities, struggles, critical thinking, shared values


An ArtUser card.

This week has been one of opening up to critical feedback in different settings about a range of topics and with a wide array of people. I am always surprised, in anticipation of responses to my ideas, perceptions, creative work, and personal and profession critiques at how exposing this process can still feel and what it demands of us to fully share. I am better at seeking out this combination of anticipation (at the prospect of gaining new perspectives) and vulnerability. I have to remind myself of what the inevitable learning dividend will be of being proactive. GWL Board members modelled great Active Listening, feeding back and mentoring this week (- I know just how rare impactful Board and Senior Management conversations are and feel very lucky to have this). I am still sensing joy and excitement having had a truly inspiring, galvanizing and thought provoking discussion with a critical friend about writing. We are meeting as both of us navigate the, again exposing and potentially demoralizing, pathways towards publishing. Writing can be a notoriously solitary business and checking in with a critical friend gave me a deeper sense of potential, of options for ways forward creatively and, vitally, underscored for me how important it is to be brave and initiative the processes of making space for open discussion and learning from hearing the creative journeys of others. I also had the good fortune to be invited to collaborate in a small critical cluster (with the potential for it to seed) with two people who are new to me. I am hopeful that this will lead to the forging a distinct source of support with perspectives that are new for us all in our creative and leadership journeys. It was great to see that the Remembering Together discussion with Kim Simpson is now live. It has been so valuable to have sustained friendships and trusted connections such as with Kim over some years now rooted during my Clore Fellowship experience. The Fellowship was a testing time and a watershed period, full of complex and contradictory feelings, unexpectedly emotional and existentially. I treasure the friends and supportive and critical connections I have as a result. It was enlightening to spend time talking to meeting and getting insights from colleagues at the National Library of Scotland in a visit this past week. Conceptualising the sheer scale of a National Library resource from my own perspective of supporting a community resource gave me a renewed sense of the responsibilities that we have across all our sites to make library materials available, to be mobilized to support critical thinking and action in communities and amongst individuals, especially as we move forward into uncharted territory, politically, socially and culturally.
All this week I have been working with this sense of uncertainty, of not knowing, and just how important it is to remember that we can gain some traction by looking back as we are cautiously moving forward. Finding anchor points in past actions, thinking and campaign records featured in some great discussions with new visitors to GWL collections and in the planning discussions that have held this week towards a forthcoming event on queer spaces at V and A Dundee, to a SCAN event with Imandeep Kaur and with a SoFA conversation scheduled for March at Glasgow School of Art with Ingrid Pollard. It feels more than urgent to maintain existing and make new spaces where debate and discussion can happen outside the realm of social media where misinformation can be easily identified and challenged by all and where discussions can more easily be anchored by material records past and present.  There are few spaces where we can work to plan new ways and refigure and adapt existing methods of bringing about a compassionate world. It feels at the end of a dispiriting week in wider politics underscoring that this work is paramount if we're going to have a lasting, unassailably embedded fair and just quality of life.

Reflection: 13th January 2023

structure, structurelessness, futures, eddies and flows, revisiting, connecting, adventures



The walking year is well underway… this week a bracing and beautiful encounter with Rumbling Bridge and the Yetts of Muckhart. Fractal joy and rushing, pounding, falling water means superabundance waves of negative ions!
I am sure I have recommended them before but Walk Scotland …what a resource! An absolute lifesaver during Covid Times and has been such a reliable source of inspiration, restorative experiences in nature, discovery of remarkable places and brilliant experiences for years now. If you are planning more walks this year and need a great guide to hundreds of amazing places to visit.
Earlier in the week a radio programme produced by Liza Greig aired on BBC Radio Scotland. She has worked miracles capturing my own and others reflections on the past 30 years of GWL and I’m feeling pleased to have been making some steady headway on my book project around Feminist Leadership. Whilst focused on the future and where new forms of effective leadership might be needed and explored I have been revisiting some of the ur texts of feminist organizing, including Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness and Levine's The Tyranny of Tyranny, that sit alongside texts such as the Dyke Manifesto of the Lesbian Avengers (1992) the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) and the myriad manifestos and approaches to working by feminist collectives and organisations globally.  It feels urgent as we attempt to shape the ways we are working today and look to the future to return to some of these important foundational texts, to read them alongside contemporary thinking, to try to winnow the value from hard won movement gains to illuminate pathways through what is a arguably an unprecedentedly complex terrain. I've enjoyed connecting with colleagues and friends old and new over this past week, and noting the ways that the weeks and months ahead in my new diaries are being populated with potential opportunities for thinking differently and nurturing new ideas. There are some milestones and landmarks including planned conversations and new collaborative adventures about queer spaces, exhaustion, endurance and motivations in feminist organising, and a look back with Ingrid Pollard to her moving, marvellous show No Cover Up .
This week, in anticipation of a retreat I participated in in York I was asked to share a favourite comfort recipe and I thought I might do so here too. I have printmaker and pal Ellie Lamb to thank for introducing me to Frida Kahlo’s recipe for meatballs. I am part of a long running book group and when Ellie has hosted we are always in for a treat. These meatballs made an instant and lasting impression when they first appeared on one of Ellie’s book club dinner menus over a decade ago. I have been a lifelong non meat eater so I transpose the meat for black or kidney beans and veggie mince (as Ellie kindly did for me on the memorable evening) and these meatless meatballs have become one of my ultimate comfort cooking and eating mainstays…Enjoy, and Frida… Se lo agradezco de todo corazón

 

Reflection: 4th January 2023

year, work, joy, brilliance, convalescence, reflections 

For the past few years I make time every few weeks for what I call life inventories, reflective pauses where I can check in on where I'm moving forward, where I am experiencing inertia, where I'm managing to get closer to my creative emergence or not, where I'm getting joy and satisfaction and where I'm noticing any breakthroughs, shifts or needs. I also have a longer term habit of end of the year of reflecting (like millions of others!) on change or ‘stuckness’ across the past 12 months. This year I can draw on the records I have shared here, the 52 blogs I have managed to generate in the course of a turbulent year. This all might sound deeply solipsistic but I have found these intentional reviews essential when, as in my case you have some stubborn, hardwired habits embedded over 6 decades to shape, shift or break! I mentioned in a 2022 blog in July that I had produced an interactive, intentionally analogue, hand crafted ‘Good Life Tree’. This creative endeavour has been so helpful in keeping me focussed on nourishing my ‘roots’, the core things of importance in my life. Adding this visual focus to my ‘inventories’ has helped me to explore ways I can maintain momentum, supporting the activities I want to focus my attention on across the roots and branches of my own life tree whether for example, sustaining and developing friendships, moving forward on creating the housing I will need as I move into older life or ensuring I am developing my digital confidence… I find it both anchoring and liberating to have a loose framework of personal review (the inventories) that encourages me to ask simple but significant questions of myself such as What are the things that have brought you joy and fulfilment? What has brought you closer to your creative emergence? My experience is that it is always illuminating (not to say arguably helpful for those that you live and work with) to attend to what one is holding on to and why and where change has been and needs to be wrought. This past year it has been a relief to be able to reintroduce deeply life enhancing and fulfilling dimensions and facets to living (travel, encounters in real spaces with people, dancing, hosting...) after COVID and to exchange a prescribed routine for spontaneity and opening up to unexpected joys. It has been sheer bliss to rediscover beloved haunts and explore places that are new to me, to reconnect with friends and family and to meet many new people, develop new friendships and emabrk on new collaborations in real life and real spaces.


It was an inspiring honour to meet with the dynamic Dayna Ash, founder of Haven for Artists in Beirut. These are some of the zines created as part of the Haven for Artists programming that she shared on her visit to Glasgow Women’s Library, August 2022.

It has been another year of cherishing nature and places around Scotland and finally getting to travel further afield and to finally swim again in a warm sea. Amongst great visits; a retreat for Raising the Roof at Findhorn with meetings with lots of interesting helpful people there and magical (and distinct from Magic) mushroom foraging near Inverness. I loved being back visiting and working in cities again including working in London with the first year cohort of Art School Plus and its director, Ella Snell. It was exciting collaborating and consulting with organizations and individuals on new feminist leadership programmes and in coaching and mentoring contexts outside GWL, all of it stretching, challenging new work for me. One of the overriding powerful strands of work this year has been this sense of really helping to open up the bonnet on last 30 years of Glasgow Women’s Library, a process that has been labour intensive, and filled with mixed and complex emotions. I have felt ‘held’ in that process by the colleagues whose responsibility is to manage this multifaceted and fascinating programme of work.  It has been affirming, thought provoking and liberating to lift the weight of my own memories and records and deposit it into the care of the GWL Archive team. I am finding this personally helpful in the longer term succession planning sense and pleased to be able to be active in a cohenrent process of sharing institutional knowledge from my own perspective to add to the interpretation of others. Alongside work, it was brilliant to be able to be back taking place in an organised 10k run after nearly three years keeping motivated without these collective celebratory moments of exertion and joy; being free to run, walk and swim in so many new places has brought a deep sense of release, fulfilment and creative headspace.




I have noted in the span of last year’s blogging the ways that reading and listening to podcasts has been nourishing and how the ideas of others have woven through my thinking and made an impact on my ways of working. I’m pleased that my reading expanded in 2022 despite pressures on time. I relished starting the year’s reads with Clare Hunter’s brilliantly researched Embroidering her truth: Mary Queen of Scots and the language of power and Jill Liddington’s astonishing, fastidious unearthing of a hidden history of lesbian life in Yorkshire in the early 1800s Female Fortune – the Anne Lister Diaries 1833-36, gender, land and authority Much of my reading was helpful in thinking about working and collaborating and supporting others and around leadership topics. So reading Rosenberg's classic Non Violent Communication and Say What you Mean by Oren Jay Sofer was helpful alongside hope fuelling texts such as Laloux’s, Reinventing Organizations 
In was drawn to more texts this past year that support ways of Listening such as…Listen by Katherine Mannix, readable and an approach that really made an impact as did a crop of political and polemical works like Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders (thanks again to Susannah Thompson for this suggestion) and adrienne maree brown’s We Will not be Cancelled and Holding Change I've found these really helpful as someone trying to navigate the tightrope of leading around equalities in the context of febrile culture wars. Charley Barker provided pointers to so much wonderful reading throughout the year including A Leaders Guide to Reflective Practice and I found Ann Cunliffe’s work on leadership illuminating (thanks Eleanor Scott for bringing her work to my attention) My Covid years reading was nature focussed and this theme ran on throughout 2022; I enjoyed Charlotte Runcie’s Salt on your Tongue with more uplifting Robin Wall Kimmerer in 2022 notably Braiding Sweetgrass and a slew of mushroom and fungi related reading including Merlin Sheldrake’s remarkable Entangled Life. I was also grateful to read Wintering and Recovery: the Lost Art of Convalescence ahead of getting COVID. I returned to the profound pleasures of fiction and poetry this year.





Ocean Vuong fiction and poetry was a revelation for me in 2022 (as was hearing him speak in podcasts such as On Being and in discussion at Edinburgh International Book Festival) and it was a boost too to reconnect with Rilke, the queer hero of Louise Walsh's The Second Cut. I found welcome escape in Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a perfect read ahead of revisiting Crete and I was thrilled to discover Nuzhat Bukhari’s Brilliant Corners. One of my books of the year was Smashing It; working class artists on life, art and making it happen edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. It is always a tonic to feel that somebody and in this case a slew of creatives have taken the time and been brave enough to speak their truths in ways that allow so many points of identification and endorsement of feelings. This book is a reminder that people who have experienced discrimination on whatever register are not alone in having to navigate systemically erected (class and other) barriers and that we can share strategies and ways of surviving and thriving . I am grateful this year as ever for all the people that I have had the opportunity to work, collaborate and connect with and that I've been involved with as a coach or coachee, mentor and mentee. I am grateful too to all those that have invited me to into public conversations or as a panellist or speaker and that have nurtured and supported me as friends and colleagues. I have appreciated the warm welcome and honour of being invited onto the Board at the V&A Dundee. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to see another museum up close and personal, to work towards purposeful strategic plans and with a group of dedicated and talented people doing exciting work in a great city. I was also honoured to become a Fellow of RSE in 2022 and look forward to all the ways I can collaborate with others in the Fellowship who are bringing positive energy to its endeavours. Having managed to generate a blog for each week of 2022 I'm interested to see whether I can sustain these reflective observations through my website during 2023 and to pass on ideas for reading, podcasts and other thought provoking sources through the year. A theme and aspiration that threaded its way through 2022 that I will carry into the new year is to look up and out and be mindful of the ‘weight’ and pace of work and the importance of leavening stress with pleasures.

Reflection: 30th December 2022

music, pleasures, dance, milestones, joy, appreciation, recordings, community



A new years toast: a Hungarian post card bought at a flea market in Budapest in the 1990’s now in my collection.

Happily, there were many pleasures and opportunities to be joyful, grateful as well as reflective this winter holiday time. I felt appreciation of the journey travelled since it wasn't possible to share Christmas with loved ones and when there were real fears that we might not do so again. A real sense has prevailed that sharing joyful experiences can be contingent and time is limited. I have been feeling this more acutely as so many people I have known personally or who have been figures who have played their part in forming the sort of influential armature of my life have passed since Covid started. So this holiday break and year end was yet another milestone to acknowledge small and large griefs and losses and feel grateful for life and love. Before the year ends I wanted to commit to ways I could be more actively neighbourly and have been trying to take some small actions in this regard. I don't want to just be the beneficiary of the random kind actions in my neighbourhood but want to try to instigate community especially at these milestone times of the year. Speaking of landmarks, last night was another... it was sheer bliss to be back dancing to brilliant DJs in a great club in the company of others who were similarly euphoric. Our happy state was brought about through the simple time honoured components of lights, a reasonable dance floor and great music blasting through a good sound system. The positive energy and sense of release and celebration brought about by dancing, music and being with others in the same state was a reminder for me of a powerful tonic to be sought out now I feel relatively safe to do so. Another music discovery I wanted to flag up… I really enjoy the podcast Song Exploder and the last episode featured Sampa the Great. The format of the show is essentially hearing how a song has been constructed from those that have written it. In this episode it was illuminating to learn how Sampa’s song ‘Let me be Great’ was built. (It goes without saying that it has been added to my feminist leadership playlist - especially since it features Sampa's mentor the monumental Angelique Kidjo!) As I record this I am amazed to have accumulated two years of weekly audio recordings and to have shared 52 consecutive ones in blog form here this past year. To start with these were records that I kept privately, but since having a website I have taken the step of sharing extracted transcriptions from them in public: it has been a little bit of an act of courage and an aspect of my own modelling of feminist accountability. I'm grateful to have been able to generate one a week for this past year and am looking forward in the new year to exploring ways that this might develop. I am thankful to everyone who has taken the time to read them and to let me know when they have sparked interest or chimed in any way. My heartfelt wish as the year concludes is for peace and love to prevail in 2023.

Reflection: 24th December 2022

feeling, change, optimism, abundance, solstice, melancholy, emergence, anticipation, turbulence, griefs



Patches featuring logos from Glasgow Women’s Library and related projects.
 
Just passed the winter Solstice milestone and the build up to it was like the anticipation of a much needed watershed. I’m ready for renewal, the shedding of accumulated weight of expectations, my own and others of the pressures of having to respond to the unremitting challenges of the year and looking forward hopefully to positive changes. I regard myself as well used to turbulence and I assume the future holds more of the same but there's been so much loss and grief and anxiety in abundance over the last few years I really hope that we're in a stage of deep change, the cultivation of compassion, understanding and kindness and to a state of global and local emergence. Part of my personal and professional thinking has been framed in recent months to an ongoing individual and organisational reflective process linked to 30 years of Glasgow Women’s Library. As the three decades anniversary programme moves into its latter stages we celebrated the arrival of GWL ‘vintage’ badges, stickers, and patches. I was reminded of how these came into the world in their first incarnations. They had been created by myself and others at earlier intervals in the life of the library and I think of these as moments where design and politics came together.  The logos featured in the new series have associated stories – I wrote about these in a GWL blog to mark the use of some of the logos in the GWL COVID mask production that was getting underway. Seeing them again recast at this time made me reflect on the persistence of living a life hoping for change. As we are approaching the end of the year I have had moments to feel appreciation and hope not least that I could hear laughter again in the workplace, that we were able to create joy filled moments (as well as managing and acknowledging melancholy and weariness) at the end of the year. 

Reflection: 17th December 2022

feeling, rage, work, class, courage, kindness, illumination, brilliance

It is always easy to forget the acuteness of the challenges of the past, but by any measure the last two weeks or so have been severe and the demands that I have felt have been extreme and required endurance, hard work and courage to try to resolve. The processes have been made all the more taxing as I have had a cold and depleted energies. What am I learning? That nothing can be more important than compassion for others and yourself, managing and acknowledging our own feelings alongside the feelings and needs of others and always to think about what are the new further lessons from whatever circumstances we are experiencing. Over the recent weeks, months and years I'm progressively feeling stronger, somewhat ironically as the challenges seem increasingly onerous and multifaceted. I am still capable of being thrown by manifestations of intolerance, frustration and rage (my own or others!) but have had my sights set on my own capacity to set angry feelings aside and focus on compassion and growth. Much of my work over the years has been fuelled by a righteous rage, of railing against injustice but it has felt critical to try to craft ways of making headway compassionately. I am writing about the interface of kindness and rage, of compassion and courage in my feminist leadership book manuscript and trying to distil experiences on ‘the front line’ into something that might have a more enduring purpose or value for others. During an earlier period of deep challenge, Sue John made me a badge that stated, Don't mistake my kindness for weakness.


 
I felt seen! And I am keen to productively and effectively hold those two things intention. Strength and kindness are facets that I want to model and I admire in the leadership of others. One of the words that I use as anchors for gearing up for the day and one of my core aspirations of recent years when threats have been existential is (to) FearLess. I know that fear can inhibit and lead to pointless worry and ‘stuckness’ and to misjudging intentions. More recently I have questioned the value of this weighty aspiration and am now more accepting that fearful things are omnipresent for myself and others and to focus more on the aspiration to be courageous. One of the things that can engender my own sense of out/rage has been really beautifully encapsulated by Catherine Liu in her slim but powerful text Virtue Hoarders: the case against the professional managerial class. (I want to thank Susannah Thompson for bringing this to my attention). Liu argues that we need to pay attention to ensuring that we're not just focusing on how the Right represents the obstacles to economic reorganization and large scale social redistribution. Liu contests that ‘the liberal professional managerial class that also stands in the way of the political revolution necessary to forge a different kind of society in world. One where the dignity of ordinary people and the working class takes center stage’. I know so many brilliant and kind people who are in the cultural sector and academia, but I have been reflecting increasingly on the extractive nature of the relationships between the countercultural and the academic and normative managerial classes in museums and cultural organisations, and how status and rewards for the ruling class are upheld within these systems. Liu notes how all professional managerial class approved policies so, for example, about inequality, racism and bias circle back to strengthening their sense of political agency and cultural and moral superiority. She contests ‘in a viciously competitive market environment, they've abandon one's cherished professional standards of research, whilst fetishize and transgression or better yet the performance of transgression.’  I'm thankful for this illuminating perspective that allows me to shift from rage and frustration to an understanding about these transactional, extractive practices are at play and hold out hope for alternative ways of cross organisational collaboration amongst colleagues with shared values across the faultlines of mainstream and countercultural working practices and cultures and towards a more transparent and productive discourse on how power functions in these relationships and contexts. Fortuitously, since my watchword is shifting to courage I came across this gift from deadfeminist.com, a generous and productive feminist broadside letterpress studio that I had the pleasure of visiting during a teaching and speaking engagement in Tacoma in the times before COVID. This piece centres Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist activist.




Qiu Jin’s struggles and her combination of activism, poetic writings and commitment to reading and learning is inspiring and her prodigious courage and feminist leadership is symbolized in this beautiful work. Qiu Jin’s story and that of others faced with monumental challenges historically, on our doorstep and around the world today puts into perspective the relative scale of the hurdles I face. I have really loved coming across another new writer to me, Nuzhat Bukhari through her book Brilliant Corners. I am so very grateful to work with Wendy Kirk the brilliant and kind GWL Librarian who has introduced me to a wellspring of thrilling books, this being only the most recent. I feel blessed to come across nourishing, arresting and surprising books in the library just at times when I need them. At this time when I'm feeling and being the focus of rage, and thinking about the harms that the unfair society perpetrates or generates Bukhari’s line ‘No one says how shame is a legacy’ really landed. In another poem Self Portrait with Shark and Skull in her collection, Bukhari uses etymological reference points in profound and thought provoking ways. Word play and discovering etymological roots that have resonance have been a running theme in recent blogs but never so eloquently expressed as here! 

In sound boxes of each word
audible depths
echo.
The word learn struck its first note
from læst, soul of a foot; leis, track, furrow.

I love the sense evoked of braided life and word journeys; learning that is travelling and evolving.

Reflection: 9th December 2022

seasons, work, clustering, change, gratified, behaviours, concern, contribution, coaching, contacts, acknowledging, co-creation



Detail of monument, Necropolis, Glasgow

I acknowledge even when, or especially when habits have been hardwired over decades that changes may need to be made and routines reviewed if and when they no longer serve me well. A case in point, for as long as I can remember the work and life pressures in the lead up to the year end have been variously, hair raising, distressing, unreasonable and often undertaken when my physical health and energies are depleted (there has been great fun and joy in the mix for which I am grateful but the general context has been fraught). For many years winter holidays were spent burnt out. I have failed to factor in the added layers of external stress and anxiety, concerns and issues that come to a head for others around this time; whether that is financial fears, loneliness and bereavement, surviving violence, addictions, all at a time of reduced natural light levels and managing cold. All are heightened around this time with the associated behaviours, asks and challenges for anyone involved in working with or caring for others. This year I feel many of us are more acutely aware of the omnipresence of stressors, griefs and anxieties. However we might feel we are managing space and time I find myself with a range of unforeseen challenges yet again as the end of year hoves into view. There are things I can do for the future, to programme less at this time, to make fewer meetings and concrete commitments in the knowledge that there will be plenty to do but more space to flex around the inevitable winter onslaught of real and metaphoric winter ‘leaks and bursts’; making more space for people who might need my help to deal with things and to avoid the overwhelm myself. I’ve also been thinking about how long it sometimes takes for me to really make sense of things or to make a shift in my behaviour, and thinking about this lapse before action when I am working with people, whether that's in a coaching context or collaborative, co-creative contexts, where you bring ideas and thoughts together with others, that things take time to settle and reach a state of comfort with the new.


Tree bark, arboretum of Castle Leod, Ross shire, October, 2022

It is always gratifying to see and hear how others winnow out the value for themselves in these processes. Recently, a participant from the first cohort of Art School Plus published an account of how the facilitation of the course contributors landed for them. Feedback like this is so valuable for those of us who are trying new ways of working with ideas that are being tested out and where trust in the process is imperative. I am excited when my own ideas have alchemized with somebody else's life in empowering ways, just as I appreciate when other’s help me in my own learning journey. It is an honour to be invited to support other’s thinking and working in ways that I can only hope might be  beneficial for them. This is the antithesis of saying ‘this is what I want you to believe’; facilitation and holding spaces such as this is a deeply collaborative endeavour, of working towards the engendering and supporting of just and positive cultural contexts. I have noticed what happens in between my own experience of having coaching and what happens between coaching sessions that I might deliver for others, that that's where the work is really done. All of this is about fathoming and prioritising when and where change is needed or where change is being sought, the inevitability of change impacting on us, changing circumstances impacting on us and how we flex around that. However scary the prospect of change might be, now the idea of inertia or the idea of the retraction of flow where you might have imagined progressive change is underway is so much more demoralizing and unwelcome. So, this is really about courage in the face of change, initiating change where we can where it's needed, but also embracing and accepting the obfuscating uncertainty that is often wrapped around it.

Reflection: 2nd December 2022

books, beauty, reflection, nature, language, manuscript, kaleidoscope, music, landscapes, ideas

I'm am gradually preparing a manuscript, and it feels like a painstaking process at this time of year.  Batteries get flat and energy feels like it is diminishing as demands on my time feel like they are proliferating with punishing workloads and unexpected challenges each day... so, an enervating combination. Even the lack of daylight hours adds to a feeling of no gumption and inertai when you feel you want to press forward with the sense of creative flow drifting out of reach. I am trying to make conditions, even in the pressured weeks to let my mind run free and enjoy the thrill of the creative process. A small strand of the bigger project about feminist leadership that I am trying to keep vital and alive is an aural soundtrack, whether this will be woven into the final draft time will tell but it is an uplifting element.  I had created a soundtrack for my stint as a guest curator for Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018 and I noted with pleasure and appreciation that adrienne maree brown had also included listening list in Emergent Strategy. This past week I found that Lynette Yiadom-Boake whose exhibition has reopened at the Tate, has shared her own evocative and uplifting soundtrack It is fascinating to consider how creatives working in very different locales and ways are consuming a shared aural landscape. So many of the artists that feature on Lynette Yiadom-Boake’s are ones on my own life playlist; Gil Scott Heron, Prince, Coltrane and Miles Davis, and specific tracks that are included, for example Solange’s, Cranes in the Sky and Caron Wheeler singing Back to Life are so poignant and effecting for me that they can move me inexplicably to tears. There are some artists that are new to me on this playlist and are now being duly added to my own... (serpentwithfeet and Blood Orange..). I am so grateful for Lynette Yiadom-Boake for sharing this dimension to her practice along with her remarkable paintings. 
I managed to get a further beautiful injection of stimulus during the weekend of my birthday, from seeing Jenny Brownrigg's wonderful exhibition Glean on early 20th century women photographers and filmmakers at Edinburgh's City Art Centre. In a stroke of coincidence the day before I saw the show I had been given the gift of a book Peak by Peak the unpublished scottish journeys of Isobel Wylie Hutchison. So it was doubly lovely to see that the exhibition featured some remarkable photographs by her. Hutchison is quoted as saying 'why not indeed, why not, is a motto by the way to which I became attached at a very early age. Perhaps I should rather say that at a very early age, it became attached to me'. Her life was intrepid; she was a botanist, a traveller, a poet and an artist and was, 'one of the most remarkable Scottish figures of our time'.  I know that through the forthcoming dark days this will be a good and inspiring read; of her island travels and her discovering through myth, nature, learning languages (Gaelic, Arabic, Greenlandic...) and the action of walking the world opening up.  I know I have much to learn from reading about this living of a life from the perspective of 'why not?' and in the process of how to embark on things from that open vantage point.


This time last year, travelling back from Skye to Glasgow, from Sligachan Bridge.

It was a pure tonic to see Haley Tompkins work in Fruitmarket and, whilst there to bump into the feminist leader, Jane Goldman. Jane is a courageous creative who embodies the idea of why not? Typically, in less than 10 minutes, Jane had shared great ideas, her wonderful, imaginative, expansive thinking, an insightful critique of the status quo and gave me a beautiful book Writer’s Shift, she is one of the contributors alongside the brilliant Iain Morrison. I recommend discovering all the many voices this project contains through the book and the webpages where you can see the ways that Jane has also brought to wider recognition the work of the remarkable performance artist Jill Smith. My imagination has been stoked through reading and immersing myself again in the writing of Ali Smith, specifically Artful. As ever it is absolutely replete with incredible fantastical insights. There are passages that I wanted to reflect more on during this Wintering period, aptly enough about reflection, a topic that I've been thinking and writing about more recently. One of Artful's characters muses that:

'At one level reflection, means we see ourselves. At another it's another word for the thought process. We can choose to use it to look into the light of our own eyes, or we can be light sensitive, we can allow all things to move over and through us; we can hold them and release them in thought. Broken things become pattern and reflection. The way a kaleidoscope works is to allow fragmentary or disconnected things to become their own harmony.’ 

It's a typically complex cluster of ideas; deep, profound playful and consoling. A gift to think that even when feeling 'shattered' that bright and inspiring creative reflections can be wrought.

Reflection: 25th November 2022

Reefs, inertia, momentum, push, courage, release, shift, ephemera, haptic, records, unearthing, savouring, joy


It's Saturday, the 26th of November and as we head towards winter I've been grappling with some things that are stuck or feel immovable and in conversations with others I'm appreciating that this sense of inertia is something that is affecting many others at the moment whether it's on a personal, organizational or political level. I've just finished reading Wharton's The Reef. The narrative arc is very much about how a chance encounter deeply affect the course of events at later stages for the protagonists and others in their orbit. These historic acts impact as an inescapable drag factor on complex family and romantic relationships. I have found it helpful to think about the idea of the reef in another context; thinking about the effort and courage required sometimes to push in order to shift something that feels immovably lodged. The discomfort involved in weighing up the associated risks, of what can happen when we push incautiously but with the prospect of that wonderful sensation of immediate release. I can recall so many instances of gratitude of sensing the forward momentum of free movement and weightlessness as if gliding through water after being locked effortlessness after a period of what can seem like heavy struggle with no purchase or sense that a major shift could happen. I'm trying to think about the ways I can practice the risk taking that shifts me from the immovable to the free flowing, thinking where it is worth expanding energy to move things forward.


Envelope containing information about the artist Elaine Mayers Salkiln.

In this past week I received, unexpectedly a really beautiful envelope and a package containing information about an artist that I knew nothing about. because it is now a rarity I savour more than ever that sense of finding something on my desk that has been packaged with care and love and brings with it joy. The sensations of posting and receiving letters and packages has been a lifelong pleasure. In an earlier blog I was talked about the joy I have had this year of rediscovering a cache of hundreds of postcards received and cherished over the decades when this was a natural habit for activists and between friends. I still savour handwritten cards and communications that remind me of the haptic and material pleasures of the pre-digital.
This week, I started work with one of the young placements at GWL. She had unearthed hundreds of slides that I donated to the collection some years ago and they needed interpretation. Slides are a technology that was essential to so many of us who were art students. I used when setting up alternative ‘slide criticism’ meetings as a young art student who was royally pissed off with the limits of the critical discussions (on feminism, identity, representation…), I can remember groups of us being crammed into tenement flat living rooms, sitting on the floor with a projector clacking through images that illuminated the dark and daring to share our images and ideas. I used them increasingly when I started lecturing at GSA and in other settings. Slides were the ways I would record work or create images for events, or as a memory joggers, or as archival record. Slides are of course a technology that is now literally opaque to the young researchers I am working with. The process of remembering then explaining the ways that these records were used and the care with which this history and the slides, such ephemeral records, are treated feels validating.

Reflection: 18th November 2022

reflection, consideration, contemplation, wonder, wintering, meòrachadh

I'm happily over the worst of the COVID experience and now trying to listen to what my body is saying as attentively as possible and adopt a Wintering approach. This involves for me trying to pace recovery as a human being. I acknowledge the fast-moving, seemingly limitless demands articulated through technologies that surround me but I am of nature and have the need to take the necessary time for a return to the fray at a natural pace. I have learnt over the years that the cultural imperative to shift ever closer to cyborg status is least helpful to me when needing to pace recovery. Despite the scourge of the rapidly filling inbox I try to remind myself of the imperceptible, slow and effective ways that trees survive wounds and damage. Apparantly forest trees might easily have a thousand wounds in their lifetime and that to survive the attendant risks (of disease, and decay) they seal to heal. A damaged area gradually becomes isolated, and steady growth of a ‘callus’ limits the spread of the wound as healthy wood accumulates around it in a process that, in the case of recovery from a branch being sheared from a trunk can take 15-20 years. I am intrigued by this idea of not expending energy in trying to expel or shed the wound but trees containing and living harmoniously and growing around the cites of trauma.
With this recent need for Wintering I discovered new books and podcasts including those produced by Blind Boy of the Rubberbandits. In his discussion with Michael Higgins, President of Ireland I discovered the concept of machnamh a term that Higgins is using for a series of seminars on aspects of Irish history. The contemporary, approximated translation of  machnamh is of reflection, contemplation, meditation and thought and is an adaption of the Middle Irish and Old Irish terms machtnad and machdad that mean “wonder, surprise and astonishment”. I was interested to discover the Gaelic equaivalent meòrachadh, also meaning reflection. Bearing in mind my recent thinking about and blogging on reflection I was really drawn to this idea of wonder and surprise sitting behind reflection and consideration. I mentioned that reflection and relevance and the interconnectedness of the two themes was the thematic area suggested by Kim Simpson for our conversation in the Shared Space created as part of Remembering Together project. It was a real joy to have the opportunity to think and talk together in such good, thoughtful and reflective company and that made welcome, restorative ripples in my week.

Reflection: 11th November 2022

kairos, chronos, Covid, concerns, postponed, polemical, qualitative, productive, gratitude, prose focused, time, opening



The Dance, Donella Meadows, (2001) reproduced in Pictus, #28 Winter 2022

It's Friday the 11th of November, and it's now been a week of managing COVID symptoms. I am not good at pausing and resting without worry. So, it's been a tough week where my energies have been low and I have been trying to minimize my concerns about canceling and postponing work, not being out in nature and trying to focus on restful, recuperative but productive activities - without having the energy to do so! As I age I find it increasingly difficult to resign myself to the idea of a week (or more) of time ‘wasted’, of time passing unproductively. This time I have offset this discomfort through reading and finding inspiration in great polemical writing and compelling, brilliantly written prose. I was given a gift just before I became infected that was extremely timely. Someone whose support I really value suggested I learn more about the Greek concepts of time; Kairos and Chronos. Chronos is associated with the type of clock watching and time passing anxieties that can dog us especially as we age, regardless of whether we feel involuntarily confined as I have this past week. Our culture and habits mean that Chronos is a scourge; we try not to ‘waste time’ because ‘time waits for no-one’ because life/time is short…time is figured as an enemy we cannot win. This quantitative mode of thinking about time can be contrasted with the qualitative characteristic of Kairos, a way of conceptualizing time/life where we can savour moments and experiences and where one can feel time opening up to infinite possibilities. This distinction between time as a punitive taskmaster and time as ripe with potential was raised by Ocean Vuong in conversation at the Edinburgh International Book festival this year. Although not citing Kairos specifically he described the ways that poetry, writing and discussions with his mother had taught him to reject the tyranny of time and embrace the ways we might move towards limitless creativity through reading and writing. So, amongst the texts that I'm grateful for, having discovered, been gifted or recommended and that have been transporting me outside the limits of Chronos in this period of recovery are:  Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Lui (thanks Susannah Thompson) and If this system cripples you, you must cripple the system by edited by Harry Josephine Giles and Sasha Saben Callahan (thanks to Collective, Edinburgh) A leader’s guide to reflective practice, by Judy Brown (Thanks Charley Barker) A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about management by Ann Cunliffe (thanks Eleanor Scott from Vanishing Point) and Issue 28 of Picpus. In this issue I discovered Dancing with Systems by environmental scientist, Donella Meadows (2001), who proposes the ways we might work within systems, including ‘Expand time horizons, Expand thought horizons…’ whilst speaking to the urgency of environmental imperatives.

Reflection: 8th November 2022

museums, feminism, civic, architecture, activism, leadership


These blogs are being compiled and appearing later than I had hoped as, for the first time I have officially got COVID.  Before vaccinations and testing was available I experienced something that felt like it must be the infection but have been lucky to have avoided it for the next two years and more. Happily there have been some more positive landmarks recently. Glasgow City Council, councillors backed a motion from Green Councillor Holly Bruce that seeks to make women central to “all aspects of planning, public realm design, policy development and budgets” in the city. It means a form of feminist town planning that involves centering the needs and perspectives of women lthat will hopefully lead to changes to the city’s infrastructure including wider pavements, more lighting in parks, and safer travel routes. In the Scotsman Holly said: “I’m delighted that our motion received unanimous support from across the chamber today and it’s so exciting to consider how much better Glasgow can become with a feminist approach to designing our city’. This news really landed for me. In the mid 1980s I had invited Matrix feminist design company to come to Glasgow during the Women and Profile 1990 festival. At the time, their visionary thinking, about a women centred approach to architecture and civic spaces, was not just something that would ever have been entertained by the city fathers of the day but failed to attract interest in the architectural community. So, to see this happening, albeit 30+ years later I am taking as a significant movement forward. At intervals over the years I have speculated on how revolutionary, and how newsworthy it would be to take the assumptions made about our city and overturn them… to imagine Glasgow with all its hard to shed associations with hypermasculinity and imagine what it would be like to be promoting ourselves to ourselves and the world as a city that centres its women and its plurality, its complexity rather than reductive ideas about what a Glaswegian looks like, what Glaswegian begaviour is like, what the story of Glasgow might be… are we seeing this turn…? I do hope so. 




Somewhat fortuitously I had the opportunity to share this news as part of a panel working with 4th Year architecture students from GSA. Thinking back to the culture of the architecture school when I was  student in the 1980s, the epitome of the pale and male – it is so cheering to see and hear who is now working in this field and to witness the intelligent, thoughtful and inclusive perspectives that the students of today are bringing to their research.. I am excited to think about what this cohort of people with different backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences will generate in terms of the civic landscape and public buildings of the future. It is always thrilling to hear from Jude Barbour, (one of the panelists prodigiously qualified to talk about architecture and social housing from a professional standpoint). Jude is a feminist leader who embodies so many of the qualities I admire; humility and openness to learning, ambition for change, awesomely talent with the courage and commitment to think big. These were amply in evidence as she spoke about the work she is now undertaking with the Collective Architecture Team that is on the scale of strategic planning… a great example today of feminist planning in action! Another absolute tonic was to hear from fellow panellists Joey Simons & Frances Lingard. Joe and Frances are active in Living Rent networking are developing a vital housing activism archive (that also centres the remarkable contributions of women leaders and collective action) highlighting tenant organising, solidarity, political contexts and civil/civic dynamics.

The week before Covid was bookended by encountering two really amazing models of feminist leadership and museums. In my first visit to the V and A Dundee having joined the Board I had the opportunity at a gathering of stakeholders to hear the CEO Leonie Bell speaking. Leonie, is such a passionate values led champion for museums and someone whose approach to leadership I also really admire. In the light of so much precarity and uncertainty in the sector it was uplifting to be in the museum and hear Leonie’s championing of the idea of the museum as a cultural anchor, of its instilling a sense of renewed pride, optimism and focus in its locale and in relation to a wider cultural ecology in Dundee. And at the end of the week, more encouraging and hope fuelling meetings at Paisley. I was invited to witness the astonishing work in progress on Paisley Museum Reimagined. The scale and ambition of the project is truly staggering. It was fascinating and exciting being part of a discussion about the ways that the works will be informed by and serve people, so very cheering even in the rain - not least to hear Kirsty Devine and her colleagues expanded thinking and open approach but because they had some special guests in the room including one of my museum sector icons Elaine Heumann Gurian. The gathering was taking place on the eve of the annual Museums Association conference and Elaine, a keynote, was spending time beforehand with the Paisley team. Unsurprisingly, Elaine opened up some critical, profound and thought provoking questions for the Paisley Team and for all of those attending, a total Mistressclass and an unexpected delight instilling confidence and hope.

Reflection: 28th October 2022

discussions, interventions, inequalities, equalities, future, project, focused, failure, space, sighted, publics


It feels like my work practices are almost back to pre COVID levels of busyness, but freighted with ongoing politicalchurn that is making it feel weightier than normal. I have benefitted from being given wonderful tools and ideas that are helping this process of forward momentum in the face of such challenges. The future can seem disheartening and current discourses angering with ongoing threats to the environment, the sustainability of cultural organisations, for artists and creatives and communities that are most impacted whenever new waves of so called austerity are set to roll out. During my recent work with Art School Plus, one of the participants introduced me to Thinking Environments. The message chimes with so much of my recent thinking about the centrality of listening as change occurs and feelings and needs shift… forms of reflection and hearing people leading to adaptions, changes and innovations are going to be more than ever critical, in the weeks and months to come. I was grateful this week was to have had a nurturing, generous, exciting conversation with Kim Simpson, now leading on equalities in Creative Scotland. I will be meeting with Kim soon for a focused sharing session for Remembering Together, this preparatory planning session led us into fruitful discussion and a shared rejection of the idea of resilience rhetoric, but also a questioning of the current enthusiasm for valorizing (learning from) failure. Our thinking is towards the potential of refiguring this rhetorical turn away from the responsibility to talk about how we fail to the ways we have been failed by structural inequalities, I am certainly mindful of the ways that mainstream governance represents what I have frankly dubbed in my manuscript as Failed Leadership and how the hegemonic modes of working, whether capitalist, colonial and patriarchal unquestionably fail/ed people. For Kim, focusing on reflection and relevance reframes this discussion around failure. I'm very excited about how we might interrogate that together and as individuals in our upcoming gathering and be positively focused movement and change.


Blue Spine, a work by Shauna McMullan, the Jeffrey room, Mitchell Library, 2010

In terms of thinking about this idea of change and forward movement, and how equalities work becomes ‘stuck’ I've been disappointed to be witnessing, at some remove, the discussions around the proposed statue for Elsie Inglis. Some years ago, I was involved with other GWL team members and commissioning some new work by creatives and discussions with other individuals and groups around what the future of monuments or markers to women's contributions to history might be. Making Space was a real milestone. Lack of resourcing (and enforced precarity in relation to GWL’s premises) at the time meant that we couldn't manifest concretely and permenently, beyond time limited exhibitions, the visions of artists Nicky Bird and Shauna McMullan in the civic landscape of Glasgow but the approaches used and the attendant discussions, about who makes, who is involved and who is represented in the processes of menorialising and marking people’s cultural contributions I think were timely then and even more critical to discuss now. I have been interested in the debates around monuments and markers to unrepresented and ‘lost’ contributors to culture for some time, being as it is, a trope of feminism. From my independent vantage point, the development of the Elsie Inglis statue illustrates some (in my view avoidable) critical faultlines. Having been involved in many passion led projects I understand how easy it is to overlook vitals aspects as a project crystalizes and how difficult it is to resist your focus narrowing on realizing your own often urgent vision. But now more than ever if the reflective work is not done, and not done with self-reflexive rigour the project will impact and be impacted in ways that can harm; the questions that need to be asked and answered before embarking on a public artwork extend beyond the logistical; for example, to ask with an open an enquiring mind (Why) is this important to do and if so for whom? What are we assuming? Who might need to be around the table for this to be a truly relevant work that (since it will sit in a public space) is felt to be ‘owned’ by all? How will we know when we are failing/succeeding in this process? What the models of working will ensure that we are making something that will be fit for the future? What is the cultural, social and political content we are working in? Do we have the range of skills, expertise and experience to make this happen in an informed and positive way? What structures do we need and what processes will we use in our work bringing this to fruition? What values will underpin our work? (In this case it feels that they project is about placing lost women in the cvic landscape but doing so without engaging with feminism...?) How will we make sure our purpose, values and decision-making are made transparent?


My own book contribution to the Making Space work created by Shauna McMullan, one of 520 blue spined texts.

This project does not appear to be sufficiently well anchored in firm foundations for the most courageous choices to have been made and sadly I fear that an oportunity has been missed for a properly thought through public art contribution to be added to the capital’s civic environment. It is always surprising to me when we have had decades of progressive, thoughtful, challenging environmentally sensitive art developed and taught in our schools of art that with such projects there is virtually no acknowledging of these specialized knowledges and instead at worst a defaulting to the least inclusive, most conservative and most dull options. Such decisions have consequences including now, inevitable storms of controvesry and criticism. If choices are made that reify the power structures, outmoded and often offensive structures that characterise the mass of public art to be found in our civic spaces these are likely to be robustly under attack. I fear that should the proposed statue be expedited by a male sculptor with much vaunted Royal connections with a practice that so evidently references the past it will undermine the positive intentions that sit behind this intiative. It appears that the less than transparent decisionmaking process sidelined both women creatives and the innovative array of ways of working relfected in today’s art practice and as such it will indelibly symbolize not the bravery and radicalism of its subject but the lack of nerve of the project team and complete disengagement with contemporary art in Scotland in 2022. Over and above any sense of lack of public debate and commitment to thoroughgoing ‘engagement’ I really feel like there's some sort of wider debate to have in Scotland about how such works that are added to the civic realm should pay attention to what exists in it already and what we want our own cultural moment to say about who we are and what we are visioning about our future… that these interventions into the public realm are carefully conceived, provoke, inspire and speak to the communities of today and tomorrow.

 

Reflection: 21st October 2022

work, power, leadership, communities

Another tumultuous week in terms of the backdrop to work and thinking. I am becoming increasingly aware of the urgency of working towards trying to create changed leadership models, although my aim is to grapple with questions of leadership in the cultural sector a spur is inevitably the unbelievable events taking place in Westminster. The chaos of recent weeks have brought home to me if I ever needed it the sense of the sheer bankruptcy of leadership models that we are having to endure and the impact that these behaviors have on the world, on individuals, families and communities. I have been thinking about this urgency in relation to a new body of work that I was invited to develop for a cohort of artists who are working in the public realm. Art School Plus is an endeavor developed by Ella Snell and I have had the opportunity to work with some of the artists in the first cohort. In the course of our discussions about leadership and power it was fascinating to note how easily we default to the idea of the powerlessness of artists and/or the powerlessness of communities and it feels to me like there is a sort of phobia about claiming it, power. This idea was something that was thrown into sharp focus listening to Prentis Hemphill in conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor - it feels like a responsibility we have to take on now to acknowledge the way that we are misusing power and acknowledge the way that we can claim and use our power to affect change. That sticking with the idea of the way that our power has been diminished, the way our power is minimized the way that we are disempowered is not what is required, that this acknowledgement of power is politically important, and stretching into our power, our empowered and powerful modes seems more than urgent now. I'm really interested to see what the first cohort goes on to do in their work in the public realm. When I was back in London walking around the streets and sort of thinking about how those that have wealth in the past and today and those that have had power are the ones that have shaped civic landscape. This is more and more the case so the wealthy corporates, the wealthy individuals, the privileged are the ones that decide what we're going to feel and see and encounter in our streets, and we experience this embodying of power. 


The end of a mushroom forage, identifying and naming, near Inverness, October 2022.

Reflection: 15th October 2022

wonder, Glasgow, Scotland, sunlight, foraging, flora, mushrooms, lansdscape

I'm back in Glasgow after a week in Findhorn followed by a week staying near Strathpeffer. It was a wonderful experience to see yet another area of Scotland that I didn't know well, to swim in a beautiful loch and I particularly enjoyed my first experience of guided mushroom foraging with a wonderful guide, Matthew Rooney and learnt an enormous amount. Throughout this time away there was a wonderful convergence of understanding more about what nature is doing to us, as I was feeling cold and waves of sunlight surrounded by wonderful trees, and how the earth functions and specifically this sort of mycelium energy. And I was reminded to as I was discovering ways of seeing mushrooms during the foraging and then in the days that followed and being struck by how many, many thousands of mushroom, fungi, mosses and lichens that I could see and that these were literally the fruits of a vast infrastructure, traveling for many thousands of miles across the landscape of Scotland and the world. I was thinking about this in relation to Rebecca Solnit's wise, words about revolution and thinking about Iran, and thinking about Afghanistan, and thinking about the revolutionary efflorescence around the world. So I wanted to place an extract from my manuscript on feminist leadership here that includes an extended quote from Solnit and offer respect to my wonderful colleague Farzane Zamen's courageous appearance, advocating for those demonstrating for freedom of Iran on BBC Scotland this week:

A rhizomatic conceptualisation of activism, agency, leadership and leaderlessness is also promoted by feminist Rebecca Solnit. Here, thought-leadership is envisioned as subtle, iterative, morphing and adapting to locales and contexts, gentle but powerful. I am quoting her at length as she has been a north star in my thinking during this period of reflection:

After a rain, mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organising and groundwork - or underground work- often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars. public intellectuals, scoial activists, and participants in social media [...] ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the trasformation happened is rarely remembered, in part becuase it’s compromising; it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins not the limelight ot centre stage. 

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories Wild Possibilities, 2016

I am made hopeful by this feminist turn to anti- (monolithic, monumental) growth, to burgeoning site specific, g/local and grass roots germinations to forms of leaderships that are radically distinct from the command and control model.

As a feminist leader I am committed to distributing power and empowering. I am for example, convinced by the benefits for organisations of dual and multiple leads, seeing the ways this will help to conserve and build upon fragile and valuable institutional knowledge, this is an antidote to ego driven regime changing and careerism.

Reflection: 7th October 2022

opportunity, organization, love, discussions, developing, productive, discovery, growth, grassroots, leadership, communities, nature, ecologies



Street sign, Findhorn eco-village.


I've just had my first experience of visiting the Findhorn Ecovillage and speaking with members of the Findhorn community. This was partly a Raising the Roof research trip and partly a retreat and involved intense discussions and learning with some remarkable people in a fascinating environment. The whole peninsula was new to me so talking and thinking were interspersed with walks, runs and swims and time spent in the dunes, the sea and woodland. It offered many different shifts in focus; in terms of expectations of what ‘community care’, placemaking and householding can mean.  Over this past year I have consciously been reflecting and gaining perspective on what can be achieved over 30 years working with a specific countercultural organisation (helping to develop GWL) and was now talking to people who had nurtured and sustain a pathfinding project for twice that period. Some, notably John Willoner, had been involved since the late 1960s. Although they are very different projects, there are similarities; Findhorn was a grass roots and organically grown project, passion led, it owes much to volunteers and is a project that has ripples locally, nationally and internationally. It has drawn people to it with expectations and visions of what it can deliver for them and as a result of these contributions has changed and grown over the decades. I caught Findhorn at a paradigm shifting moment; as it shifts from the focus from being a first and foremost a community to a being a charity, following the death of a founder and with its 60th birthday next month. Findhorn was still gaining a new equilibrium following Covid which had radically impacted on the volumes of paying visitors and conference attendees, sadly, an arsonist had burned down two of its earliest and most symbolically important community buildings and there was a palpable sense of the eco-village and its complex organisational ecology moving into a new phase as its housing strategy shifts and its community ages. There were some great discussions to be had about the natural entropy of projects, about death and renewal and about the onerous responsibilities of care of elders. Findhorn ecovillage has had some significant growth bursts and is now home to over 400 people and is nearing capacity. Community members are reflecting on what growth has meant for them on the past and might mean in an uncertain future. As we were meeting, the new Prime Minister’s inaugural speech at the Conservative Party conference used the rhetoric of growth as though it was an unequivocally desirable aim and synonymous with success whereas at Findhorn the fragility of the communities relationship with nature and each other relies on profound decision-making around when growth is welcomed and arrested. Findhorn is renown the world over but some members were keen to think about the quality and possibilities of expanded conversations rather than any complacent belief that those that are ‘in the know’ will connect. There was an acceptance that the community, although welcoming people from around the world for 60 years could be insular and their information loop restricted. Part of Raising the Roof’s next steps are to discover more about the eco villages in urban settings around the world and it was exciting so see here in Scotland the sort of nature based housing and householding in Findhorn’s Park that I have only witnessed at this scale in Scandinavia and Northern Europe; to see car sharing, food growing, renewable energy, green burial spaces and other aspects of co-housing and eco village living and to imagine whether this could be realised in Glasgow.


Communal garden, Soillsig co-housing community, Findhorn eco-village.

Reflection: 30th September 2022

freedoms, feminism, access, political leadership, rights, suturing, safeguarding


This week, I've been thinking a lot about the interface between cultural organizations and politics and how fertile, fragile and febrile these interconnections are. The macro structures within which we work and our dependency on them make this an urgent and yet uncertain terrain that can induce a sense of moral harm or moral anxiety. I have been thinking about creatives and activism and about the productive suturing or divergence that can occur between the two. Productive interfacing between creative and cultural work and the political movement towards social justice, I know can lead even when the challenges seem insurmountable and overwhelming. With this in mind and the new Westminster Government arguably fuelling a sense of deepening precarity for democracy and cultural agency it felt more than timely to have had the opportunity to meet a group of delegates visiting Scotland from Finland. This group of energised, committed political and cultural leaders included the Cultural Director of the City of Helsinki, Reeta Heishanen and Helsinki Library Director, Katri Vanttinen. It made me appreciate how some nations have successfully prioritised civil empowerment through building literacies, encouraging reading, foregrounding public education and underwriting the human entitlement to be able to fully access the information that everyone needs to make the most of our lives. In Finland this commitment to libraries is enshrined within their legal system and commitment to citizenship couldn't be made more manifest in Finland’s public library building. This article in The Guardian gives some indication of the context and the kinds of civic spaces in Finland where reading and learning and public education are enshrined.  It was encouraging to hear from these colleagues how new citizens, migrants and homeless people are amongst the communities that are being taken care of in this process of ongoing investment in libraries.
I've been inspired and humbled to have witnessed this week the ways that those who are closest to struggles for justice and freedom in Iran, including those exiled from it are using creativity, social media and demonstrations to push forward fearlessly. Their struggles mean that freedoms for us all are more likely to be safeguarded. The ways we hold power and can use power and can and are required to act is an absolutely critical one for discussions about feminist leadership and governance. These questions surfaced this week in the feminist leadership and governance meetings I have been involved with in Scotland and England; discussions that are both energising and productively challenging. The greatest demands; to be accountable, to be responsive, to be active are properly made of intersectional feminist organisations but it seems critical to understand that this ask is often made of feminist organisations that are working with, relatively, the least resources. How might we respond to the political asks of us by others and ourselves whilst not burning out as people and projects? How can we advocate for taking the necessary ‘time out’ from struggles whilst not experiencing degrees of guilt and, or 'moral injury'? What can we learn about safeguarding lives when deep injustices and heinous acts of individual and state sponsored cruelty, genocide and oppression proliferate? How might we better support each other to step in and out of the struggle/s? I am interested to see how discussions in many different (mainstream and feminist) settings; housing, architecture, libraries, museums, academic institutions…play out as they respond to the key political struggles of our time locally and globally. Issues of safeguarding freedoms, human rights and access to lifechanging cultural resources couldn't feel to me more polarized from the rhetorical tone of Westminster this week and more urgent to attend to.

Reflection: 23rd September 2022

developing, connecting, courage, leadership


An interesting and busy week with, happily, lots of hope fuelling moments and connections against a backdrop of challenging and troubling political convulsions. I had the good fortune to spend a little bit of time catching up with Zandra Yeaman, and to feel inspired about the ways that the work that Zandra is courageously developing in the heart of the Hunterian will be expanded and developed. I also had the opportunity for a conversation with the always uplifting Immy Kaur, and am excited about the opportunity we have to braid some thinking together over the next weeks and months culminating if all goes to plan with a public element.
I first met artists Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale who work together as the Alternative School of Economics during a Lock Down zooming phase but sharing space this week IRL allowed us to talk on a different register about leading in our different alternative library settings (they run the Rabbits Road Institute Library). I am interested in the values work they have undertaken since we last talked and was excited to discover the range of creative collaborative projects they had realised including those weaving politics and literacy learning. 


A detail from the Households: (Un)Ruly zine launched a s part of the Archifringe Unlearning compendium. September 2022

The launch of The Architecture Fringe Unlearning compendium was another watershed moment in a collaboration between the Fringe, Raising the Roof and Voices of Experience. Being given a scrapbooking and writing project that became part of the animated publication Households had given me such a creative lifeline when I was laid low at the start of the pandemic. Elements of my own and others' hopes and dreams for alternative housing captured at that time are now threaded into a beautiful new publication our Households (Un)ruly book, giving momentum to the next phase of the Raising the Roof story. It  was a joy to share a platform with Nicola from VoA and others from the Unlearning crew at the launch. I also loved reconnecting with free thinking architect Akiko Kobayashi - another creative whose work never fails to lift my spirits. We had collaborated as part of the beautiful Remnants project published earlier this year.
Yesterday, I was humbled to be able to share a virtual space with a newly forged women's library sister project in Kabul, and meet two of the women who are bringing that project to life. I am visualising, sooner rather than later, welcoming them across the threshold of GWL.
The week concluded with welcome reconnections with two really wonderful friends, one from the US and another from Orkney. Lorrie offered kindness and a safe haven in San Francisco some decades ago and introduced me to the unforgettable experience of daily bus commutes from and to the Mission, and to the quaintly queer delights of Guerneville and Sonoma County. Meeting such pals at intervals (Lorrie last visited us when GWL was in Trongate) offers opportunities for me to hear some feed back on what they're seeing in terms of change and growth (at GWL, in Glasgow, in our lives...) along with welcome wise counsel. During her short visit we packed in some sharing of activism and perspectives on feminist leadership in the time of Trump/Johnson. My friendship with Castlemilk Womanhouse co-ordinator Rachael Harris stretches back over 30 years- I value her unique qualities as a person, as an (undervalued) artist and as an incomparable raconteur - just a few hours in her company - balm for the soul.

Reflection: 19th September 2022

art, discomfort, dialogues, work 


My PhD research included ideas around class, and the politics of ‘fashioning to excess’ (by Royals, post war music and film stars and working class women). I drew upon many sources including images from my own family album, from girls annuals and other pop culture references. Here, my Grandma, Esther Patrick, is caught in a local newspaper meeting the Queen in Doncaster in the 1970’s  - Grandma (centre) is wearing her ‘leopardskin’ fur collared jacket and a mildly disparaging look.

It's Monday, the 19th of September, and I'm recording this on the day of the Queen's funeral. The omnipresence of the ultimate signifier’s of ‘fashioning to excess’ have made me reflect of the research I undertook for my doctorate which included an analysis of the use of jewellery by Royals, post war women stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and the demonised fashioning of jewllery excess when used by working class and or Women of Colour. For anyone interested in this niche but currently faintly topical terrian here is a link to an article I published entitled Queening It: women’s taste for jewellery excess. 
I was grateful this week for Priya Atwal's excellent thread about the complexity of dealing with the death of a monarch with many helpful associated articles including a Guardian piece by Afua Hirsh. I am relieved today that this period (where continually thinking about monarchy and the inequities of wealth, power and privelege has been more or less unavoidable) is ratcheting down (at least for the time being) from saturation levels. I am hoping that there will be space now for more thoroughgoing thinking, consideration and discussion about what this period of history means for all of us, and what our democratic and leadership needs might be into the future. I have appreciated any and all opportunities to avoid the streaming of pomp and circumstance across all platforms and Doors Open Days in Glasgow provided welcome incentives to look away from screens, visit buildings, attend talks and events and literally share space with others. I had loved seeing Sharon Hayes brilliant work Richerche in the old Adelphi School Board building in the Gorbals last year - I remember how sweet it was to see marvellous work in a magnificent safe-feeling setting as I cautiously made my reentry from lockdown. This visit during Doors Open was to hear Jenny Brownrigg talking about her research begun during her own daily lockdown walks tracing the locations and reseraching the histories and fates of Glasgow’s magnificent public School Board buildings including the Adelphi. After the evocative and interesting talk there was a chance to explore the building and to spend time on the ground floor with the remarkable, deeply effecting work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abu-Rahme, May Amnesia Never Kiss us on the Mouth.  Both the exhibition and talk had been organised by the Common Guild and this visit underscored for me how important is it to safeguard and keep accessible these remarkable public spaces and to be able to access freely artworks that bring us closer to ideas and perspectives from international creatives. I had a few stirring conversations midweek with colleagues who are new to me and I am sensing the momentum building for dialogues between those looking for new approaches to leadership across the cultural sector and about feminist leadership specifically. I have been enjoying hearing from others about what leadership means to them and how challenging questions are shaping their thinking. And finally, I really enjoyed the opportunity to take a trip to the Hunterian with my Mum and spend time with Zandra Yeaman’s excellent Discomfort intervention, demonstrating just when we need reminding, that shifts in thinking and reframing the uses of landmark buldings and collections is possible.

Reflection: 11th September 2022

travelling, changing, zenia, returning, habits, thresholds, places


I returned yesterday from my first trip abroad since the outbreak of Covid. It was a welcome rediscovery of Crete, an island I first visited decades ago. Before heading off I had fortuitously caught a discussion on Radio 4’s Open Book between Kamila Shamsie, Bettany Hughes, Okechukwu Nzelu and Octavia Bright. They were speaking about their love of the work of Mary Renault and specifically her classic novel, The King Must Die. With much of the action taking place in Crete it made for perfect holiday reading (alongside Russo’s Feminist Accountability and Liu’s Redeeming Leadership: an anti-racist feminist intervention!) In the radio discussion, Hughes had raised the significance of the concept that prevailed from around 6000 years ago in Greece of xenia. Xenia doesn’t allow for a direct translation but approximates to a form of unwritten etiquette that meant the extension of love to both friends and strangers and a formal requirement to welcome others across your threshold. This exercise of ritualised friendship was considered the mark of civilised culture. Hughes spoke about xenia having a further sense; that civilised people were those that both dispensed hospitality to strangers but had a twinned responsibility to travel themselves, to learn and discover (xenia is a concept that fuels the Odyssey). The notion of being xenophilic (rather than xenophobic), of exploring the challenge and demands conjured by xenia seemed timely to reflect on as I was travelling across international borders for the first time since Brexit and as a tourist, with all the associated political and cultural complexities. Xenia asks us to discover ourselves and others through travel, to be open to learn from the cultures of the world and to have the courage to experience things beyond the comfortable and familiar. From a very different perspective,  I was mindful of an illuminating and politicising discussion I had heard recently between contemporary movement facilitators Prentis Hemphill and Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist and activist. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I love the Finding Our Way podcasts that Hemphill hosts; in this episode Dr. Osorio spoke movingly about her experience as a Kia’i, a protector of land and water in Hawai’i. As I was hatching plans for my own long awaited trip to Crete I did so with a sobering awareness of the costs of such fantasies of escape on the lives and economies of others. It was affecting to hear about Hawai’i outside colonial projections and specifically the Hawai’i beyond tourism. Prentis Hemphill made a profound observation about how her own politicisation around the idea of Hawai’i had made her more conscious of the responsibility that she felt to improve and change her own home city rather than thinking about ‘escaping’ from its limitations and problems. The discussion raised for me the idea of the responsibilities we have to try to work to address why we feel we need to ‘escape’ and what we might do (further) to ameliorate the problems that affect our own communities.

I was thinking about these ideas in relation to my feelings about Scotland’s Highlands and Islands. I know, during the long lockdown my fantasises of escape came to focus on striding up remote Highland hills, spending restorative time in lochs and by lochsides and sailing to northerly islands, thoughts that evoked similar deep longings as those of floating in a warm Mediterranean sea. What is at stake when we locate our longings for change in places that are (marketed and mythologised as) fundamentally different from our everyday? There is clearly much to learn, and especially so at this time as we pass into the realms beyond climate emergency from the politicisation of spaces and places articulated by indigenous Island activists globally. Changing places for a while can confer a sense of what xenia can bring today (the pleasures of abandoned screens, living life outdoors, the joys of experiencing smells, tastes, ideas, languages different from those that are routine for us and yes, swimming each day in a warm and healing sea…) it provides conditions to shed the habitual (checking emails) and adopt new rituals (drinking mountain tea). This trip was a dramatic reminder of how much can change within the space of a week; sadly people I knew passed away, the country convulsed again with the death of the Queen and the annointing of a new Prime Minister was elected…being away both exaggerates the sensation of continual churn and how much there is to un/learn.



xenia in action, graffitti, Chania, Crete, 2022

Reflection: 2nd September 2022

care, anger, time, remembering  


2022 has been the year I discovered Ocean Vuong. His poetry, as so many have discovered before me, is truly remarkable but I have learnt so much from hearing him speak – what an eloquent, profoundly moving, funny and beautiful communicator. Having heard him in an astonishing On Being discussion with Krista Tippett and a live audience eariler this year I was thrilled to note that he was programmed to be in discussion at the Edinburgh International Book Festival  The agility of thinking and complexity of ideas shared in both these programmed events repays repeated listening (and gives an indication what a thrill it must be to be one of Ocean’s students!) but I did want to share here a couple of Vuong’s insights from the Edinburgh event that landed for me and have had a lasting impact in the days and weeks that have followed. The title of Ocean’s most recent book is Time is a Mother and I found this to be a liberating conceptualisation; that, rather than the idea of the tyranny of time, of the passing of time crushing us, Ocean speaks about the idea of time giving us vast opportunities for creative thinking and experiences, a gift for those of us increasingly contemplating our mortality. Finding myself in the midst of a year of specific reflections on 3 decades of work at GWL, Ocean’s reflections on both time and remembering were salutary. Ocean’s work is rooted in memory and he spoke about this process of recalling time past as a process of conjuring and inhabiting it again and that it has emotional costs for the present. I found it hugely helpful to grasp this idea of the emotional investment in remembering for creative work. I will restrict myself to one further standout moment of Ocean in Edinburgh – the idea of care being ‘anger improved’… In my writing about feminist leadership and, as Sara Ahmed articulates it “Living a Feminist Life’ I have been trying to speak about and understand better the inextricable relationship between (the holding of both) hope and anger. I am noting how creative endeavours and ideas can be born through an angry response to intolerable injustice or inequality and how an ethics of care can grow from that sense of an imperative to do something and how this work can shift to focus on how that thing is done. Care results as the initial action however angry is rooted in itself in care. I am looking forward to any and all opportunities to learn more from Ocean Vuong as a writer and as a voice for our time.

Reflection: 26th August 2022

connections, communication


In the last few weeks, as opportunities for connections expand I have felt the renewed sense of the benefits of meeting new people, reconnecting with friends and colleagues, hearing about work in face to face discussions and welcoming visitors. As Covid restrictions lift I have been noting the fundamental joy of being in the company of others. In recent years I have tried to be more proactive in expanding my range of 'go to' people; I say this from a position of not being a natural or willing 'networker'.  I love people and conversation and deeply value collaboration but often feel that others have more ease in picking up the phone and initiating contact. Younger women with courage have encouraged me to do this more often and I have gained confidence also in the fact that having been more open to the idea of forging new connection some of my closest friends now include those I have not know for long.  I am enamoured of the idea of there being a constellation of good and kind people across the world that form a beautiful hope fuelling network of support, not 'group thinkers' but people that have a values led approach to being in the world and care for each other. Opportunities to connect with people I admire and those that are new to me have opened up in recent weeks...some new but close to home such as the writer and literary maven Heather Parry – (I love her co authored recent free and invaluable Freelancers' guide) and others who have chosen to visit GWL such as the remarkable Dayna Ash from Haven for Artists in Lebanon.  Coming out of Covid in Scotland has had its challenges but I was humbled to say the least to meet with such a dynamic, brilliant creative who has come through this challenging time in Beirut.  Dayna and her crew are responsible for an array of creative cultural, feminist queer work such as their wonderful series of Mandou zines (copies of the first 3 are now accessible thanks to Dayna’s donation at Glasgow Women’s Library). I would really recommend looking at their work online. I am lucky to have a few great networks that have played their part in supporting me during the worst of the lockdowns. Today I felt moved by reuniting with the CLiC group for the first time IRL since before Covid. This is a network built through great facilitation, wonderful participants and a working approach based on open discussion and learning across the team and as such it was easy to get back into the groove and feel immediately the benefits of sharing ideas and mutual support.



Postcard image of facade of The Women’s Building, San Francisco, (Lapidge Street Facade) 1994, mural by Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cevantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez. From my collection of postcards gathered of travls and visits from the 1980s on.


I have been reflecting on how the technologies of communication that I've experienced have changed over time, thinking spurred by the rediscovery of my collection of postcards. There was a time when I would send many postcards on each and every trip away from home and would pick up many in any and all visits. Postcards during my youth carried huge political power and adorned the walls of my own and other punk and countercultural folks’ flats, homes, workspaces. I collected them over decades as either mementoes, whilst many others are records of trips made and messages sent to me from travelling family and friends. Some are really beautiful examples of the generosity and care of others in the sort of constellation of informal support I feel I have been the beneficiary of, whether that's a postcard sent to me from Sam Ainsley encouraging me to connect with a feminist leader she has encountered in Australia the 1990s, or postcards sent as messages of introduction from people I had yet to meet (I discovered a postcard that had been speculatively sent to me from the legendary artist Monica Sjoo). These ephemeral records are fascinating reminders of how communication methods matter, in this case the texts that offered me a sense of support and love alongside statements and images that were often providing life affirming political, creative and cultural connections and identifications.

Reflection: 19th August 2022

Ploughing, repairing, crafting, pathfinding


I am finding solace and illuminating ideas in the series of Finding Our Way podcasts.  Prentis Hemphill’s conversation with Jenny Odell was a timely reminder of the ways we might resist the ‘attention economy’ whilst we try to cultivate ‘endangered’ forms of attention. And I was thinking about this, the effort required to resist screen based absorption in relation to the need I have felt throughout my life to find ways of enduring life challenges through focussing on making. I feel I have survived several episodes of deep stress and ploughed a course of recovery through developing my skills around and belief in the grounding  acts of crafting, restoring and repairing, mending and making.


Detail of embroidered runner in progress constructed from found tea cosies.


This week I had to create a 20 slides and speak about my whole life in 20 x 20 second statements as part of a whole team ‘this is who we are’ reflection session at Glasgow Women’s Library. Undertaking this discipline, a sort of patchworking in its own terms, involved sourcing images and distilling into specific nodes the essence of who I was to communicate to both people who knew me well and people who know little about me. I found it fiendishly difficult but the process had the unanticipated outcome for me of allowing for introspection and asking some fundamental questions about who I was and how and when had changes occured that brought me to being the person I am today; feeling acutely the memory of being an unconfident school aged, young person, feeling at sea, as a result of the sort of shame that needed to be survived and navigated through education systems structured around unfettered classism and sexism. I was happy to note the diminishing degrees of imposter syndrome from the period when I was part of the GSA teaching staff and felt humbled to think about the challenges that I've faced and overcome with the support of others, notably Sue John and the relative sense of courage I now feel as part of the eldership at GWL.  It was instructive to reflect on how Sue and I learnt how to fundraise, learnt how to curate, to manage finances, learnt how to manage people, learnt how to design spaces, to publish, to support teams, to do very, very many things that required overcoming our sense of fear or societal resistance. I feel proud that we have found our own way and have been path finding with others (with no professional training) in the spheres of libraries, voluntary sector, academia, museums and archives… The whole felt and feels like a journey of radical lifelong learning (ongoing) that I appreciate I am lucky to have experienced.

Reflection: 5th August 2022

Plants, joy, consumption, appreciation, adundance, refashioning, sounds


As I age it's becoming increasingly apparent what the important things in life are for me. This has become literally clearer as I've been developing my own diagrammatic Tree of Good Life, culminating as part of the ‘vapour trail’ of small and large griefs and existential tumult of Covid Times. I mentioned in an earlier blog how the allure of material things and consumption feels like it is dropping away. A clothing, style, jewellery and fashion lover all my life I find my passion for consuming stuff diminishing (happily I never had the budget to indulge to the extent of have lasting guilt over past indulgences) and I have noticed a paring down of my consumption of things generally (something I mentioned was an intention in a blog from April 8th this year). The only significant things that have been added to my home in the past few years are gifts gratefully received and, admittedly and accelerating during Covid, plants galore. In the past year the only significant garments I have bought are sports bras (difficult to economise around I have found) wet suit bootees and gloves. I decided I would not use Amazon as soon as we locked down and have found this is something I can easily do without. My attention has shifted to making and mending. My first degree was in embroidered and woven textiles and I have been hand and machine sewing and knitting since I was a girl and these pleasures and the delight I have in fabrics, yarns and and stitching endures. I can milk endless pleasure from working with, mending and refashioning items in my home and wardrobe; a T shirt from Venice Beach, now 40 years old, a gifted dressing gown patched and worn thin. But uppermost I am taking joy from cultivating as much as I can a sense of health and well being and friendship and love and watching nature and noticing the miraculous growth of plants given just water and a happy place in which to sit. I am awed by the scale of the tomato plants growing on my balcony just now and how the tiny seeds that I planted in the spring have grown into these almost frighteningly huge green boughs. I love music and coming across favourite tracks can since Covid frequently reduce me to tears… and I am continually discovering new sounds that inspire and move me…(as I am speaking I am hearing Chronixx Never Give Up  By Your Side by Sofia Kourtesis and Luv Like by Nia Archives)

I appreciate how lucky I am to have any and all of the above but ‘post’ Covid, how relatively little I need to bring joy and a sense of contentment.

Reflection: 5th August 2022

habits, conflict, feelings, movement, senses, patterns


I try not to have too many regrets but I do rue time wasted what I call 'conflict tangos'. Many of us have developed habits of fruitless disagreement and enervating, exhausting forms of ‘logger heading’ of one sort or another. This thought surfaced as I've been reading more of Sofer’s Say What You Mean that draws on and develops aspects of nonviolent communication.  Sopher subtitle is gently encouraging of us to ‘find our voice, speaking our truth and listen deeply’ and advocates ways of shifting from a ‘blame culture’ and ‘loosening the grip’ of habits of conflict. How might we individually and collectively, shrug off habitual views of and behaviors around conflict, the default (and therefore largely scrutinized) intentions of blame and self protection? Sopher identifies four main habitual patterns that we might all recognize at work in our personal and professional networks: of conflict avoidance, competitive confrontation (engagement with degrees of force) of passivity (acquiescing and giving up on our own needs, appeasing) and passive aggression. I recognise that I've had all these feelings and acted out all these behaviours in habitual ways over the years and regret each and every instance. I know these were responsive behaviours when I have felt fear, or anger or upset or threats of one sort or another. I feel grateful that as each year passes I feel my own grip loosening, that none of these patterns hold any value for me and that I recognise that none have served me well.  Just as I have formed new habits, I am also trying to do my best to stand alongside and encourage those taking often difficult journeys towards loosening their own grip on unrewarding habits of conflict.

Sopher talks about trying to view these habits with a kindly eye as we endeavour to shed them since these are behaviours that may have protected or gone some way to ‘help’ us for a long period of time. This idea of compassion for others and compassion for oneself as we're trying to shed habits I find both motivating and critical in work towards the creation of new and just societies, support communities and form new organisational cultures.

As the dust settles on the Women's Euros I didn’t want the historic moment to pass without saying how uplifting I found it in so many respects including witnessing some exemplary feminist leadership in action by the England coach, Sarina Wiegman, as the whole team. It was clear how there was a sense of release and freedom to their play even in front of the unprecedentedly huge live and broadcast audiences, with egos minimised and where team working was at a premium. This was a beautiful evocation of flair combined with unselfish play; a team in sync leading to group success with so many goalscorers and no clear ‘star player’. This was a team coached and encouraged to work together without wasting any energy on internal conflicts or ego driven behaviours rooted in blame or self protection. It’s a model of working (where maximum energies, imagination and creativity is unleashed for the benefit of all) I am passionate about and believe is vital for organisations to succeed especially where resources are low, where the challenges are enormous, and how every minute of a team members time is precious. I know of so many institutions where it is ‘normal’ for a significant proportion of time and energy to be spent by leaders in conflict resolution and of managers energies diverted into firefighting disputes, and dealing with a demoralising steady stream of ‘disciplinaries’. Happily I know what harmonious working feels like, it is what we strive for at GWL. It’s what I enjoy about collaborating with coachees, and the teams I have the opportunity to collaborate with in my indpendent work training and workshopping.  I know what it is like to enjoy successful genuine, true team working where everyone is supporting to the best of their abilities (and with compassion and honest forgrounded) the uplifting of others, and all striving to support movement change. Working towards creating and sustaining cultures where the minimum amount of time is spent in conflict (as opposed to holding the space for healthy exchanges of idea and perpectives) in order to unleash positive energies has become a critically important aim in my own work,  one that I demand of myself and in my work alongside others.

Reflection: 29th July 2022

acknowledgement, subsistence, sense, relational dynamics, metaphors, work, disagreement, feelings, mutuality, tenderness, oscillations, difficulties, nourishment, nutrition


In recent weeks I have been conceptualising the spectrum of my life's activities, my whole life needs and desires, the things I want in it and how I want it to feel rooted as I move into the future with my life partner and loved ones in terms of a tree. The exercise has involved making, thinking, visioning and reflection. One of the extended metaphors that has arisen is of the things that are in my life that are 'stuck', knotty, cause discomfort and are ready to be shed (like dead leaves). At this stage I will feel ready to place them to be folded into my life tree as compost.

Being taught about compost was one of the most satisfying, magical and incredible discoveries; part of my introduction to allotmenteering many moons ago. I love the ways that this most fundamental process has emerged for me now as a way of understanding my own growth and learning from aspects of my life that are the most challenging. I am thinking that as knotty issues are resolved that they shift from being singular matters that are attached to us to shifting and decomposing into the roots of our being as a nutritious, enriching material that has transformed into a source of fuel and strength for new ideas. Along strong branches I am visualizing evergreen leaves that represent the perenially desired aspects of my life. In this way I feel I can understand my own life challenges, even when they may have been painful, difficult or harmful as part of a transformative process. Doing this work has made me even more aware of the things that I want in my life, to the degree I may be able to control them (for example as long as I am able, only engaging in fulfilling and purposeful work).


Detail from one branch of my Good Life Tree.


Most aspects of work, play, activism and creativity involve being in relational dynamics with others; developing better and clearer ways of communicating seems absolutely critical as it impacts of the way that myself and others feel as a result of working and collaborating in whatever way alongside each other, and now being open to learning how disagreement or discomforts can transform into compost! I am increasingly of a mind that there is there's no more critical work. This is an exciting but daunting prospect when faced by the degrees of complexity I alluded to in blog 13th May 2022. I was reminded of the diagram shared by @MonaEbdrup when this week I was revisiting chapters in, Say What you Mean: the mindful approach to nonviolent communication by Oren Jay Sofer. In one extract, Sofer notes a summary of human needs. It struck me that the basic subsistence needs alone are currently fraught with anxiety for many, not just those for whom poverty, restrictions on movement and economic injustices have (due to capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy) long been a 'way of life' but, as the cost of living rises in the West, have become critical issues for those who have experienced relative privileges for generations and who are coming to terms with precarities around food, shelter, medicine, physical safety, and sleep. Sofer goes on to summarise human needs such as freedom, autonomy, choice, a sense of independence, joy, pleasure, affection, attention, appreciation, a sense of support and tenderness, of acceptance, care, compassion, consideration, needing to be seen and heard and understood and trusted, of mutuality, self expression, of the need to have a sense of self, confidence and dignity and self acceptance, self care, self knowledge, self realisation, of creativity and purpose and a need for hope and inspiration and inner peace... these and more are things that all of us need. In our dynamic relationships these needs have a fluctuating sense of priority that may or may not be explicitly articulated, but indubitably we're bringing these things to our expectations and our demands of each other. They are expressed through our feelings, behaviours, communications and actions. Here I am struck again by the 'weight' for those involved in 'eldership', leadership or are responsible for holding space in movement organizing, of ensuring that needs are met or at least acknowledged as they arise, and the complexity of holding, bringing, managing, noticing, appreciating the needs of others whilst acknowledging our own needs as they are inevitably brought to bear in our meetings, conversations, decision making and visioning. This is a responsibility in the work that we do when we (want to) work together. For those developing leadership or who are in formal or informal leadership roles, ethically working with needs and feelings is necessarily onerous. Our cultures of working include many silencing strategies that minimize and ignore needs and feelings. It is more than evident that the feelings and needs of those with least power in our communities and in institutions have few if any of their needs met and their feelings taking into account. Our outmoded working practices insist that 'good' leaders also park their feelings and needs. My sense is that organizations and leaders that are committed to change need to make space for the fullest array of feelings and needs to be aired safely alongside (privileges being acknowledged) and that those in leadership roles need to find the courage have courage to share their own in ways that devolve power in the process.

Reflection: 22nd July 2022

paradox, productive tensions, attuned, appreciation, holding, rooting, compassion, teams, watersheds, agency, principles, gatherings


This week has included an important watershed with the first gathering of the whole team at Glasgow Women's Library for the first time since March, 2020. It felt important to make space to acknowledge the challenges and change over this period and to allow for group acknowledgements and appreciation; thankfulness of the support we have had from each other, the support we have had from GWL and the ways we appreciate how we have all survived through this period. I wanted to pause to appreciate the library as a space where the waves of tumult have been navigated in an ethical and open way with much bravery in evidence and learning involved for us all. There has been much churn in that period over and above the day to day precarities and uncertainties, fears and losses with seven members of our current team joining us (for the first time or returning) and with so many valued staff leaving in that period. I have felt the weight of being part of the shepherding and sharing of support and managing an often 'atomised'  team remotely for long periods (we didn't furlough) and trying to acknowledge and manage the demands this has made. So, it was moving to finally be able to see and hear the majority of the team finally gathered again in one room, sharing food, thoughts about the future and some laughter and begin a deep reset, building on the learning before and during Covid.

I have been reflecting alot this week on how much I appreciate kindness, personally and professionally. Perhaps the impetus was the flowering, for the 20th consecutive year of amaryllis bulbs given to me by a beloved volunteer. The bulbs have been in the same spot and the same pot and each year they bloom. I remember the kindness of Laine who I still miss not having in the world. 




In last month’s blog I mentioned that I have been reading brown’s Holding Change. As ever I have noted the impact and critical importance of learning, reading and researching as a vital source of support and companion to real life challenges. Holding Change includes some great contributions including an essay by the facilitator N’Tanya Lee. In What is Principled Struggle? Lee cites the qualities of struggle in organizational settings including the importance of being both honest and direct, but critically while holding compassion. Lee notes that often we're comfortable doing one or the other, being honest or direct or holding compassion and how people might choose to be honest and direct without care (and how this has become indicative of some aspects of social media culture). What has developed is a state of constant attack; of a tendency to shrink or correct others without care or alternatively where one might hold so much compassion that it feels like an act of harm, just to tell or hear the truth. Lee asks for us to aim instead for these qualities to be held in equilibrium; to be able to speak the truth to other human beings, attuned to the impact and in a spirit of moving forwards shared understanding and unity. I have been mulling over this insight in relation to ideas that I had been trying to develop during the research period on feminist leadership. In an earlier research paper, I had included episodes of breakthroughs and dilemmas in feminist leadership. These moments were shared as autoethnographic instances. One had occurred during the practice of shivasana at the end of a yoga class:

I am grappling with the ways that leadership might enact ways of modelling the management of anger. I’m home [in Glasgow] and back at my regular Yoga class. My teacher speaks about the dance between two pillars of Iyengar, of kindness and honesty and that an aspiration is to hold these two essential aspects of life in productive tension. She speaks about how they two qualities can often be seem as deeply opposing...that one may avoid honesty as an act of kindness...

I have tried to keep my yoga practice alive during Covid Times allowing time for further contemplation on how polarised ideas and seemingly paradoxical tensions can yield benefits; of holding tension while being completely open and relaxed, of trying to focus on rootedness to achieve a sense of lightness, of concentration whilst emptying the mind. I am open to how we might think through these dualities as they relate to both states of being and in organisational frameworks and the commitment required to productively allow opposing tensions simultaneously. How might one lead whilst foregrounding the energy and agency of others?

Reflection: 15th July 2022

open, relations, space, structures, thinking, creating, reeling, building, alternatives, dreams, countercultures


I've been thinking this week as I've been working on my manuscript of some of the maverick, pioneering feminist and women's buildings and spaces that have been created in the past century or so and trying to discover more about how they were run. What were the organizational structures that enabled projects to survive and thrive? One of the organizations that I've been researching is the Women's Building, a feminist institution founded in LA in Autumn, 1973 that finally closed its doors the year that the Glasgow Women's Library opened its own, in 1991. By this time the Women’s Building had finally fallen victim to a decade of conservatism and the reduced funding for the arts and alternative education under the Reagan administration. Although not without its pitfalls, The Women's Building was a successful and ambitious, innovative experiment with a long and powerful legacy. I'm thinking about this initiative in relation to the adrienne maree brown concepts that I referenced in the last blog; about how we might reject what we are offered where this does not reflect our visions and dreams and focus instead on creating alternative, different spaces that might reflect us and our movements towards change. How do they function, these places and spaces that might reject normative ways of working in favour of bold experiments that chime with our own imagination?

Whilst researching I found a citation of Susan B Anthony from the Grand Domestic Revolution, a remarkable book by Dolores Hayden, about the history of feminist designs for American homes, neighbourhoods and cities. Anthony, as early as 1871 is quoted as proclaiming, 'Away with your man-visions! Women propose to reject them all and begin to dream dreams for themselves.' It is sobering to note how long it takes and how much labour is involved in these types of experiments in countercultural space making, specifically feminist space making and the ‘fugitive’ spaces made by Black activists and LGBTQ+ communities to evolve and develop and how quickly they are erased from memory. A theme I am trying to develop in my manuscript is how diagrammatic representations of the structures of maverick institutions may help or obscure discussions and understandings about how countercultural organizational systems work. I wanted to include here this image that seems to speak eloquently to these enquiries. Doughnut Economics researcher Karita Purohit contributed this diagrammatic representation to a zine produced by Civic Square. Her clear, powerful depiction of the intersecting structures of power that we contend with leads us to the challenging questions What might we build? What might be the shape of things to come?

Reflection: 7th July 2022

kindness, radical, empathetic listening, invitations, appreciation, gifts


This week, against a febrile political backdrop, I've been reflecting on how I can better centre compassion and kindness personally and professionally whilst acknowledging that rage, frustration and anger can ambush us all. I am deeply appreciative of the support I have in my life from friends, family and colleagues and I know how much I benefit from acts of kindness, random and otherwise.

I have been revisiting  the work on kindness being undertaken by Carnegie UK, and the Kindness Leadership Network (KiLN) of which @womenslibrary Librarian, @WendyKirkGWL is a part (Wendy is a leader in kindness that I can only aspire to emulate). The Carnegie/KiLN’s most recent report is entitled Leading with Kindness. The wider project  demonstrates what is possible when kindness becomes an operating principle. This most recent report folds in learning from Covid Times and concludes with a Commitment to Kindness that distils their collective discussions, research and thinking so far into six goals designed to enable organisations of all kinds and in all places to sustain and deepen their focus on kindness. Although the learning is from libraries, this body of work offers up helpful approaches that show how kindness might play a part in the radical resetting process so many are going through working in cultural and other organisations – surely a model for those currently busy ‘resetting’ in Westminster?

I was thinking about the Kindness Report in relation to the findings recently published about @womenslibrary, again research that was germinating during the period of uncertainly brought about by Covid. The Transformations research developed by Dr Juliet Wilson, Prof Kathy Hamilton Dr Holly Porteous and Dr Sarah Edwards (wonderfully kind folks themselves!) used GWL as a case study to explore the impact the space, resources, approaches to working and programmes including volunteering make on users and the Library team of which I am gratefully a part. Current and past people involved in the library’s life were invited to speak in confidence about how GWL had impacted on them. I found it heartening to read how several participants associated aspects of leadership, modelled across the library team to qualities of kind, empathetic listening, and that this was in turn linked to change…for example, here:

I think it’s also that in the Women’s Library they’re willing to let you try. So you can come up with an idea and say, “well, I think this would be a really good idea,” and oftentimes they’ll say, “cool, well go try it out, do it and let’s see what happens”. I think that that is really valuable as well, and that’s probably how the lack of the hierarchy works in the Library: it’s because it’s not necessarily just letting people do whatever they [want], you know; it’s not like mayhem as you would maybe think that it would be, because it’s very structured andordered. It’s just listening to each other, considering what people are saying and trying things out and being willing to change and adapt.

I take this as a message to continue to endeavour to pause, listen and be open to ideas in whatever work I am undertaking and that this responsiveness is more likely to underwrite sustainability and longer term relevance.

Someone who I feel is an exemplar of generous sharing and a kind, ethical practice is @ImmyKaur the innovator, thinker and Founder and Co-Director of Civic Square in Birmingham. (I first mentioned Immy in these blogs in May and she is a continual source of inspiration). Although she has brought about hugely successful projects it is instructive that she sees her work as ‘an ongoing journey of discovery, emergence and learning together.’ So, leadership that is porous and based on ongoing listening, adapting and wrought in dialogue with others.


Feminist taliswoman and bushcraft firestarter tool: unexpected gifts from kind @skagirl67

Reflection: 1st July 2022

logics, imagination


Two adrienne maree brown books that are new to me have just been delivered with perfect timing. ‘We will not cancel us’ and the ‘Holding Change Workbook’. I was reminded to order these having heard brown’s compelling and always uplifting voice on an edition of the On Being
podcast,  (Thanks to @nadineaishaj for bringing my attention to On Being via her tweet outs). brown’s interview with Krista Tippett was illuminating. In their conversation brown reiterated the themes and ideas of ‘emergence’ that have been impactful for so many of us in recent years, but timely to be reminded about how the systems and structures that we are working within chime with or more likely alienate or create tensions for us. The weeks, months and years of Covid Times heightened the sense for me of the lack logic in political decision-making at Westminster (and in so many global contexts). brown simply and starkly observes that this sense occurs when we are being forced to function in someone else's dream, someone else's imagination. Might we not always feel doomed to be unable to comprehend the decision-making of leaders whose lived experience is wholly other? Gaslighting will indeed feel omnipresent, a culture of evading accountability the order of the day and the actions of leaders seemingly beyond logic whether on immigration or climate change where it is their own and not our reality.  In a week when several police forces in England have gone into special measures, brown calls upon us to build other realities, using different reference points and our own imaginations, and offers heartening possibilities in the face of despair. She expounds on the benefits of investing in fractal ways of organising (in contract to the Strong Men Leadership I was indicting in my blogs in May, 2022. She reminds us that we can't just (try to) put change at the top layer of our institutions or our civic apparatus. Change needs to be fractally developed. Referencing the remarkable thinker, writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs brown raises a timely question about how we treat people when we're upset or angry with them and to look at the ways we can frame our responses as questions; sage advice when anger is omnipresent and reasons to be angry are proliferating.

It is perhaps worth noting that this past week I've taken some time to breathe! What has emerged in actions associated with taking time out and reflecting is the start of what I can only describe as a sort of ‘good life tree’ fashioned from post-its into a chart that captures with hopefullness my  visions for my own ways of working and imagined life lived into the future. I am someone who has not be practiced in been or expert in life planning, but with the multifaceted challenges of living today and the uncertainty that undoubtedly lies ahead I felt it was time to shift to be more proactive in living my life. In this process I have valued all the work I have been doing in recent years around coaching and (self) compassion and excited about the abundant ways I might bring this to bear more purposefully in my work within and outside GWL and into my non work life. An oft hidden fact is that non-normative ‘careers’ have added precarity, so working towards ensuring I am less ambushed by challenges and prepared for life changes seems sensible at 60! 

Reflection: 24th June 2022

queering, being ‘otherwise’, hope, shifts, change


This week has been one of abundance; lots of learning, many conversations, deep thinking and decisive actions with forward momentum. I am recognising that this can happen even when my batteries feel flat, when I am standing alongside loved ones who are undergoing loss (which was sadly the case this week) and where there are significant disappointments in the mix.

I'd been hoping for an opportunity to take time out later on in the year to complete a manuscript (my application was for a second such writing/thinking retreat in over 30 years of ‘front-line’ work!) so it was a sadness not be successful in my bid to make dedicated space and time for this in the way as I had imagined but nonetheless as this week concludes my spirits are high.

My sense of hope has been buoyed through disussions and connections made. @SueJohnGWL shared with me (from her own coaching and leadership toolkit) an insight on how we choose to enter into life events; from conferences, to meetings, presentations and gatherings that are personal or professional, of how we might present or think about ourselves as either captives, passengers or as adventurers. Watching the way that Sue has been flexing her adventuresome approach has given me courage to do the same and helped keep my energy charged. @skagirl67 a source for me of so many ideas, shared a brilliant article this week, an interview with Gail Lewis, the black feminist writer and psychotherapist. Although this article isn't available on the web, Lewis's chapter on Queering, the black feminist psychoanalytic is due to appear in a new collection of writings on Queering psychotherapy, non-normative insights for everybody, edited by Jane Czyzselska which will be published by Confer Books this autumn, and will I am sure expand on some of the illuminating themes Lewis raises in the article I have in front of me, that explores what queering therapy means for practising counsellors and psychotherapists. Lewis conceives of the possibility of being human ‘otherwise’, about queering being ‘fundamentally about a way of thinking about and calling into question structures of power’. She speaks of,

‘the production of categories of personhood black, white, man, woman, straight, gay and so on [as] manifestations of structures of power. When we queer them, we're saying, how is power operating through these categorical assignments that is problematic, that produces its own exclusions, its own hierarchies of value […] white, male life has more value than black or brown, non male life. And even if non normative or unorthodox sexualities are allowed to be recognised by the state that is still within a structure of a hierarchy of value, and that they are accepted, but there's they still aren't quite right. Indeed, the whole language and practice of minoratization exemplifies that.

I'm interested to think about this in relation to the complexities and identity in my work and life and look forward to the book being published.

Another thing that is as lifted me this week is the decision to open up the gathering Up Helly A in Shetland to women - such welcome news and resonating with themes in my recent blogs about remaining hopeful that the trajectory of change is towards progressive movement. And again, I would really recommend to folks who have the means to do so to order the book edited by Gaada,  We Axe For What We Want part of the collaborative project with @womenslibrary now available in a new edition that is sparks by the campaign to address the discrimation against women in Up Helly A. In particular, I would draw attention to Any Gear's is beautiful piece on carrying the weight of activism within it. I'm hoping that many of the people who have been campaigning for this change in Shetland can now lay that weight down and truly celebrate an historic shift towards equality.

It was wonderful this week to get a chance to be in conversation with colleagues at Paisley Museum Re-imagined and One Ren, to feel that sense of a properly warm welcome and an opportunity to discuss progressive ways of working within the museum sector with colleagues who are practising a form of open, deep and radical reflection and listening in their own practice. So great to know there is scope for productive discussions with people that are interested in the approaches to feminist leadership I am exploring.


Gaada’s, We Axe For What We Want, 2021

Reflection: 17th June 2022

organising, speaking, decision-making, self-management, authenticity, wholeness


I have been thinking more of late about concepts of self-management in organisations and some interesting things that I'm learning from Frederick Laloux's book Reinventing Organisations are around the idea of authenticity and wholeness and specific questions for organisation founders. Laloux says that the way we show up determines to a large extent how comfortable other people feel to bring their whole selves to their workplace, that the more we self-disclose, the more authentic, the more vulnerable and honest we are about our strengths and weaknesses, the safer others we feel to do the same. In the past I have had experiences where making myself vulnerable has had consequences that led me to shift from openness to reticence about exposure but have regained the courage to fully commit to this responsibility. The longer that I'm involved in organisations and as an observer how they work well and porrly the more I feel the resposibility to try to be my authentic self in my various work actvities. Laloux quotes Deborah Boyar, a founder of self-managing organisation Holacracy who speaks in terms of the workplace is a stimulating and challenging place but also one that, if those involved in it are values led in their personal and professional conduct can confer a degree of security. This might seem counter intutive for those who work in a setting where honest dialogue is avoided or discouraged and consequently opening up can feel ‘unsafe’. I think this combination of honesty and openness (which is as I understand it is still by no means the norm in cultural organisations) leading to a sense of profound safety, is going to be a critically important one for organisations to aspire to and model in the weeks, months and years ahead. Workplaces that are built on shared responsibility, accountability and trust (rooted in equality) can, in my experience, offer more of a sense of ballast in uncharted waters. Boyar speaks (of the organisation she co-founded) about the sense of becoming securely, organizationally attached and that this can be a profoundly healing and otherwise psychologically therapeutic as well as effective organisationally. 'I feel more real, grounded and incarnate. I feel inspired to focus and accomplish more than I ever have. I feel empowered to make decisions and invited to support to invite you to get support around doing so. I feel totally lit up by the aim that I'm serving'.

I'm thinking about the shift from the idea of being a leader/decision maker to becoming and developing increasingly into leadership as coaching, as others in the organisation feel increasingly empowered to make decisions, only seeking advice from me (alongside others) when myself and/or others are meaningfully affected by the decision or are considered to have valuable expertise in the matter. These feel like subtle and incremental but important changes.

Reflection: Friday 10th June 2022

memories, organisation, process 


I've just come back from a 30th anniversary memory gathering session held at Glasgow Women’s Library hosted by the GWL@30 team. For the first session, GWL co-founder Kate Henderson and I were recorded alone recalling the process of setting up what was to become Women in Profile and later Glasgow Women's Library. Our recorded thoughts and memories will be shared alongside those of others involved in the Library's development in the course of the next few weeks and months. Some themes that have come through for me at this stage of reflection is the fatefulness of this process of originating an organisation, without a fallback  financially or in terms of instituional support. This sense of precarity, of early Women in Profile and GWL has persisted 30 plus years, coupled with a sense of responsibility. Kate and I recalled so much laughter and tears in those years, so much emotional investment and a true sense of adventure and discovery, of reaching, stretching forward where there was no pathway. Right from the outset (when we were presumptuous enough to call ourselves the Scottish Writers and Artists Archive...!) and from such humble premises and beginnings, there was a sense of aspiration to create a unique, countercultural, alternative resource for Scotland.  I feel thankful that I had Kate as a companion in those formative years and to have been joined in the GWL endeavour by so many others who have had an impact on the way that the organisation has evolved and developed.  I am grateful too that Kate and I are able to sit together and laugh about those early years where in fact there was so much jeopardy and risk, so much at stake and so many barriers and that we can have fun as well as deep and thoughtful reflections on the origin process. So, I'm looking forward to the next sessions and feel hopeful that this will be a process where we can lift weight from our shoulders and place these perspectives and experiences within the public discourse, conserved and made accessible by the library. 



I designed and laid out several of the early Women in Profile newsletters.  This detail is a publicising of a slide criticism meeting I hosted for women artists at my home.

Reflection: Friday 3rd June 2022

opportunity, self defence, space, architecture, design


It’s June and I'm sitting outside a house looking out at Sanna Bay, Ardnamurchan. I can hear a cuckoo and skylarks in wall to wall sunshine that is being reflected on a sparkling blue bay. I am croft-sitting for a pal and thinking, as I use the space what a luxury it is to inhabit an environment that wholly reflects your own brief for living. The croft house was created by architect responding to the needs of the people and the animals who would live in and around it. This environment is close to nature but, essentially homes are about the interior spaces, their functionality and beauty as well as the ways that we might aspire to live, as here, lightly on the land. We need homes to feel safe and warm, and (as is super evident here), to be in a conversation with the outside world, from the flowers and plants inside our houses, plantings in window boxes, balconies and gardens if we are lucky enough to have any of these, and out to the views of nature around us (ditto) Other fundamentals; feeling like we can seek out space to be quiet, to stretch to write and read (a room of one’s own!) to have natural light, some joy as we move from one room to the next, places to cook and eat with others…simple needs, but ones that are denied to so many. The long dark history of housing both in rural neighbourhoods such as here and in urban contexts is one where the majority have felt damp, cold, insecure, overcrowded, unsafe, made homeless due to unfair rents and escalating repayments subject to noise, infestations of beasts and diseases of one sort or another. My work with Raising the Roof, Take Root and Four Walls has been about how could I might realise, in collaboration with others, the manifestation of a space that serves us well and is fit for purpose. Campaigning and planning for this has undoubtedly proved to be the most tenaciously intractable and difficult process, even though, over the years I have had the privelege to gain knowledge, access to gatekeepers, have had the support of people who are extremely well connected and specialised in their skills and expertise, have cultural capital and experience in design, and placemaking. It is clear to me that the fields of architecture, housing and landownership is all about power and that that power is not placed in the hands of those who are seeking to have safe, accessible, uplifting and affordable homes. The agency to determine the ways we live and the spaces we inhabit has been largely a reserved right for those who have control, authority and, or money. I am thankful for having had the support of Voices of Experience and Archifringe for making space for my own and other’s voices to be heard and offering scope for exploring and hopefully bringing a new model to fruition in due course...


I've just had the first wild swim of the year in Sanna’s beautiful bays and feeling a deep appreciation of the thrill and restorative impact of immersing myself in cold, clear, salty water. I'm sitting reflecting on this past week, and how interesting it was to be there albeit digitally, at the RSE Fellowship ceremony  and seeing so many incredible distinguished people, including keynotes, Annie Lennox, and poet and Director of the Harare International Literarture Festival, Chirikure Chirikure receive Fellowships. I was gratefully receiving my own in a cohort that included Janice Kirkpatrick with whom, 36 years ago I co-founded Graven Images; the design company was conceived while we were still students at Glasgow School of Art. I already the feminist bug at that time and was keen to interrogate spaces and objects and the way that they might be refigured from this standpoint. It was exciting if fraught with challenges to confront the sexist assumptions and beliefs that lay behind designed objects and environments. We were committed to trying to develop a design company that could address gender divisions and how these were manifest and emphasised in the design of ‘things’. So, for example, I developed clothing that was consciously to be worn by women for ‘self-defence’ purposes as well as being spectacular and excessive; clothing that ‘troubled’ gender assumptions.


This image from Elle magazine catches Janice and I as Graven Images in 1986.

At this remove  and having followed a very different life path to that of commercial designers I am grateful for having had an arts and design training. It has influenced the way I approach problem solving, communications and given me tools to navigate the varied and challenging realms of collections, academia, activism and voluntary sectors, fields I have worked across in the subsequent decades.


Another unexpected gift this week was receiving a publication through the post that I had contributed to in 2019. Remnants; how you build a city illustrates how women have evolved different ways of thinking about space and place, specifically about Glasgow. It encompasses the voices of critics, architects, writers, thinkers and planners in conversations, investigations and poetry. The ever inspiring Panel, Civic Room and Voices of Experience are behind this initiative. Having worked with Panel and Voices of Experience over the years I have found both to be inspiring and brilliant organisations to work with. The Remnents project had offered me the  opportunity  to have a conversation with Akiko Kobayashi, an architect whose work and approach to leadership I admire.  Akiko and I touched base to share ideas, texts and thinking just before lock down; our conversation gently and productively hosted by Prof Suzanne Ewing. Remnents includes many other prodigious creatives including Ashanti Harris, the Mother Tongue team, Louise Welsh and Lauren Printy Currie. 

Reflection: Friday 27th May 2022

feeling, selfhood, ideas, women, fiction, justice, watersheds, green shoots


I have noticed that I'm resuming fiction reading. I had been devouring fiction in the early weeks of the pandemic, revisiting some familiar reads in anxious times and then a year or so ago shifted to reading almost exclusively texts that were around modes of communicating, listening, leading and organising alongside books that were about nature; from mosses to fungi, astronomy to indigenous environmental knowledges. And, for whatever reason now I am tacking back into the world of fiction. I've just finished Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan, and Woolf's The Waves (a text that accompanied me on the existentially challenging Clore Leadership adventure where I was frequently ‘at sea’!) with Octavia Butler underway and Louise Welsh in store... I am revelling in how different prose writers convey ideas of selfhood in profoundly lyrical ways and drawing great comfort as well as challenge from this. I’m feeling excited again about opening up to what fiction and poetry can offer me as I cautiously step back into the non-digital world.

This shift back to fiction has coincided with a watershed moment at Glasgow Women’s Library. Myself and other colleagues are noting a resumption of a quality of hope in people's reenergised and reenergising use of the space, our/their movement around and use of it  (seeming more relaxed, more positive, more future focussed...) I am sensing a dynamic where people are generating and bringing new ideas and fresh thinking as they too open up to the world, evident across and amongst visitors, staff and volunteers. The building is holding and reflecting a different energy - we've had a wave of new staff who brought their own and revived our energies and encouraged us to reflect on and recommit to what we're trying to do in the library. Change is a constant at GWL but this post Covid phase and the sea change underway with staff, users, Board and volunteers is making me feel optimism is revivified and hopeful despite the undoubted challenges ahead. I have a renewed sense of purposefulness. During the onset of Covid so many of us felt atomized, so much work and effort was needed from us all to try to encourage and sustain basic forms of connecting, whilst keeping our own batteries charged as much as possible.

I'm grateful that I have this sense of hope and green shoots as they are occurring at a time when the spectacle of politics in Westminster is reaching a nadir. This last week it was difficult to not name it as political gaslighting in extremis with what felt like naked demonstrations of abuses of power. Interconnections between powerful elites were also seemingly omnipresent in the establishment; across criminal justice, the political class and the press barons. We know such connections pose threats to democracy and to hard won human rights, so each day sobering to say the least. One faint hope came from a commentator I caught who was interpreting Westminster and ‘Partygate’ as like last days of Rome, a sort of Bullingdon Bacchanalia, the swansong of absolutely outmoded form of institutionalised entitlement and privilege.


Searching through old photographs this month I discovered a whole series of images of Jenny Holzer’s work in Time Square, New York in 1993 phtographed in my first visit to the city. Works that have maintained their ability to speak to power.

Stimulating discussions with a colleague lifted my spirits this week. We talked about what we can learn from and about generations of women and the deep learning to be had hrough conversations between and across grandmothers, between mothers and daughters and what these reveal about the changing social, cultural and political landscapes. Syma Ahmed is doing remarkable work in this respect. It’s often been helpful for me in moments where inertia reigns or there seem to be retrenchments in progress or a rolling back of rights (such as those recently that have reimposed limits on access to abortion in US) to reflect on the (limited) opportunities that were available to my grandmothers, the opportunities that were available to my mother's generation, the opportunities that are available to me and the opportunities that are available to girls of my niece's age. Opportunities for material comfort or security may always be precarious but in terms of self-identification, the right to fully discover the complexity of one's selfhood and the knowledge of the right to be able to be yourself, and claim your own place in the world seemsan make.  A very cheering prospect at least from the privileged perspective of those of us able to live as citizens of Scotland today.

I was thinking about this, the incremental (if often faltering progress on equalities) this week when we hosted women involved in national football in the library space (ahead of the Scottish Women’s Football League final being played next weekend). It was moving to see the players and managers and other pioneers of the game speaking with grace and composure to the massed press and I felt proud to have helped create a space where these women could come in and consciously acknowledge and reference in their interviews how history has changed for them and for women in wider contexts. I felt a deep admiration for these pathfinders; young women and older women involved in the game. Football wasn't a game that girls were allowed to play formally at school and informally in urban play pitches when I was growing up. My dad had been a talented footballer and had many years of pleasure from playing soccer, cricket and rugby (finally playing his last team cricket match late in his sixties). None of the girls of my generation could develop prowess and a love of the game from playing it at school, let alone go on to make amateur or professional squads. That change has occurred in my lifespan. I believe that the dial can be shifted on any and all injustices based on discriminatory beliefs, on democracy and human rights and cultural social and political justice. Entitlements are a chimera; equality is an unstoppable momentum.

Reflection: Friday 20th May 2022

feminist, leadership, politics, Strong Men Ideology, anti-feminism


Remainiac podcasts helped keen me sane during the build up to and immediate aftermath of the Brexit Referendum. Remainiac podcast successors, The Bunker and Oh God What Now? have performed a similar function for me during lockdowns and the first years of Johnson’s leadership. The most recent offshoot following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Doomsday Watch fronted by Arthur Snell (offering an exploration ‘of the geopolitical threats of tomorrow’) has provided me with some vital context and information when regular news bulletins fell short.

This week on The Bunker, Nick Cohen interviewed Gideon Rachman about his new book The Age of the Strong Man; how the cult of the leader threatens democracy around the world. Their discussion focussed on the ways male authoritarian leaders have come to dominate global politics. The ‘Age’ Rachman focusses on is one I use to provide context in the first chapter of my manuscript on feminist leadership so this was a fascinating listen. In it I try to make the case for feminist leadership as the antithesis of this form of conservative, oppressive and outmoded authoritarianism. I discuss the prevalence and proliferation of unfettered, toxic hyper masculinity in leadership and read it as in polarised relationship (and a reactive response) to  feminist thinking, working and leading. In global politics. misogyny and anti-feminism seem to me to be at the heart of forms of command and control, national leadership evident in the rhetoric and ideologies of Putin, Trumpism, in the representations of the politics of Afghanistan, on Johnsonian era Westminster, Bolsonaro’s destructive approach to leadership in Brazil, and the dispiriting brand of authoritarianism that links Lukashenko, Ertegun, Kim Jong-un, Modi, Xi Jinping…

The devastating consequences of these forms of dictatorial, ego bound, narcissistic leadership underscore the urgent need for alternatives based on equity and environment, equality, justice and human rights. ‘Strong Men’ ideology directly threatens the progressive equalities campaigns that feminism has championed. In my research I have encountered the myriad ways that feminist leadership is erased, disavowed and neglected. It is never taken seriously as a counterpoint to both ubiquitous mainstreamed (failed and failing) forms of leadership or understood as a viable, credible antidote to more extreme forms of ‘Strong Men’ authoritarianism. As far as I can tell, and I will report back with my apologies if I discover otherwise, Rachman does not offer a gendered critique (although gender is conjured in the title). Although a fascinating topic, sadly the podcast discussion offered up no analysis or accounting for how masculinized politics could be countered by deploying feminist approaches to governance. As I say, perhaps when I close read the book I will learn more. Reviews to date so far also fail to make what seems to me to be the obvious and compelling case. For millennia whilst manifestations of Strong Men ideology and leadership has provided the blueprint, there has been a failure to sustain stable democracies, global access to human rights, an end to world poverty and conflict, for nearly 80 years we have lived with the threat of global nuclear warfare and have witnessed the world brought to the brink of climate destruction… In such a context is a turn to feminist leadership approaches not a reasonable if not more than urgently required response?

Srilatha Batliwala’s definition that:

‘feminist leadership and governance is always about agency and power being devolved where possible, rather than aggregated... is about openness, discussion and transparancy and less closed, retention of power and control.’

strikes me as both a powerful indictment of ‘Strong Men’ Leadership at the macro level and a call to ways of working at the micro, organisational level where redundant leadership models still hold sway and where change rooted in equalities is similarly overdue.

‘Strong Men’ ideologies have been at the helm of globalisation, devastating climate injustices, capitalism and imperialism… so what alternatives might we be (increasingly desperately) seeking? Might radically intersectional feminist leadership models be acknowledged as offering hope? My sense is that Rachman’s subtitle: how the cult of the leader threatens democracy around the world might more accurately be revised to how the cult of patriarchal leader threaten democracy around the world.

I have been inspired by the work of researcher and advocate of feminist leadership, Srilatha Batilwala and of Leila Billing, co-founder of We are Feminist Leaders’ . I came across a little gem on Leila’s twitter feed in the middle of the week, where she shares a reminder to herself, ‘what does not get interrogated, gets reproduced as a reflex, which is why I make the same mistakes over and over’. Addressing aspects of our working and being that are unhelpfully ‘stuck’ and trying where possible to acknowledge and learn from our mistakes typifies the sort of leadership I aspire to and is surely a necessary corrective to the narcissism and refusal to accept failings modelled by ‘Strong Men’?

I was grateful to have some fascinating discussions this week around the themes of proactive versus reactive working modes and the tensions that can arise between ‘going with the flow’ and intentionally and productively interrupting the flow. We might consider 'going with the flow' as a passive activity that cedes or devolves power to others but such passivity can run counter to efforts to lead with accountability. I am discovering that it can be critical to either stem the flow when a reflection, a pause or a values led intervention is needed and in this process take responsibility for creating and making space for productive ripples and waves as well as other perspectives. I know how much I appreciate the bravery of leader colleagues when the temptation might be for them to ‘go with flow’. It is more than often than not exciting when they step in and change the course of actions by calling for a pause where agreement or actions might seem inevitable or unquestioned and make creative eddies opening up new possibilities and alternative streams of thought and action.

Reflection: Friday 13th May 2022

youth, citations, elders, complexity, structures, movement, transparencies


I'm just surfacing from a heavy cold and one of the few positives in this period has been having enforced time out to be able to read and think. The sheer complexity of even the smallest organisations has been in the foreground of my thinking as I have worked through the illuminating Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux. I'm sure that I'll be speaking more about my thoughts around feminist leadership and self-managing organisations in the next weeks and months, if not years. Coincidentally, I came across a diagram shared via the always admirable and foresighted Imandeep Kaur’s Twitter feed (@ImmyKaur), that very simply illustrates the (minimum) degree of complexity that there is when you have small numbers of people working (or living) closely together.


The diagram of communications the source of which is Mona Ebdrup, visual practitioner, feminist and regenerative activist is a reminder of how important it is to understand so much about how we can feel working together (unheard, overwhelmed, caught or held in a web of support, encountering a beautiful and fascinating plethora of new and different perspectives…) and underscores for me graphically what I have been writing about as the perceived ‘weight’ and complexity of feminist leadership. Given the multiplicity of interactions and where as is the case in feminist led organisations there is a commitment to hearing and responding to all voices it is remarkable that we survive, thrive and move forward.

I have been thinking about this a little more in relation to the deep ask that Kathryn Mannix in Listen has of us to be crafting our listening, noticing and wondering and that 'listening is not about the listener, its about the listening'. I've also been reflecting as I describe earlier in relation to the Mothers of Invention podcast about listening and communications between young people and elders and leadership across that spectrum of age. I am struck in Lola Olufemi's Feminism, Interrupted, how in visioning how ‘stuck’ oppressive power will be disrupted by feminism in the future she situates her own call to action as rooted in 'movement lessons'. So, attending to the movements that have preceded her own current approach to activism. I am excited at what a deepened discussion across ages can yield.  Frederick Laloux speaks about how young people, born into the digital world have a completely different expectation of how access to information, transparancy around systems and their relation to structures works as compared to expectations and assumptions formed by those of us born into the non digital realm, in organisations and the workplace. They are more arguably more likely to be healthily sceptical and critical about systems and structures that are based on outmoded and redundant regimes and methods and can often clearly point to where the rationale needs to be challenged. Their perspectives will ensure that the project of feminist leadership is driven forward in purposeful ways including the refiguring of organisational frameworks inherited from patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism.  I am passionate about all approaches that result in shedding harmful and redundant ways of working and unleashing the potential of teams and individuals and understand that this can only be done in ways that include perspectives across age.

In my own ongoing research on feminist leadership, my writing and work in GWL and other settings I am thinking about how citations can be thought of as a form of honouring of elders, a braiding through of progressive thinking, writing , podcasts, artworks, manifestos...so, not just an academic convention but a powerful thread of hope and movement towards a changed world. I noted how Lola Olufemi does this throughout Feminism, Interrupted and how Jemma Desai whose thinking I am continually awed and moved by does this too as she speaks and writes as in, for example her recent 'words' for the Spring issue of Art Papers Thank you, Jemma for bringing this work to my attention and for gifting a copy of this publication that was new to me. In her piece Jemma weaves her own inspirational thought provoking words with those of Lola, Teresa Cisneros and elder Toni Cade Bambara.

Reflection: Friday 6th May 2022

ideas, pleasures, discomforts, uncertainty, values


I have had a deep thinking week with many opportunities to connect with others to share perspectives and ideas about leadership, our aspirations as agents for change, and the discomforts, difficulties and pleasures in working with others. One thing that I picked up through via @ManiraAhmad’s was a really helpful diagrammatic representation of how to think and act more clearly thinking in our leadership approaches: to be reading widely with maximum curiosity (clear thinkers draw from multiple disciplines), to put reality before theory (those who are interested in truth will have to learn to live with uncertainty) and, very topical for discussion I have been having this week, to try to keep money and status out of the business of leading in order to ensure that we are thinking clearly - it is it's easy to self censor when we fear financial status push back. Further helpful reminders: to be vigilant of what we bring to aspects of leadership… that the more a particular issue is wrapped in our identity, the harder it may be to think clearly about it. And finally, to note whether we've got ‘skin in the game’, if we're going to give advice, then we should ensure that we are living by it. So thank you Manira for this, one of the many pearls of wisdom shared in your Twitter stream.

Reflection: Friday 30th April 2022

dialogues, structures, conversations, self reflection, elders and youth leadership


Interesting, provocative and challenging conversations continued this week, specifically with colleagues working in other sectors around the rich terrain of internal organisational support structures or what used to be called ‘support and supervision’. I am interested in critical adapting, adopting and forging new frameworks that allow for the unleashing of the best of us through forms of ‘support’ using feminist approaches. I'm struck by the somewhat counterintuitive aspects of feminist governance where seemingly bureaucratic structures can, in my experience lead into more creative, open, empowering dialogues. In recent years I'm increasingly enamoured of frameworks, approaches and transparent and agreed upon rationales that flex according to shifting needs and where (self) reflection and accountability are hard wired. I've been steadily reading Kathryn Mannix’s Listen, the art of tender conversation in recent weeks. It feels really apt to have come across a quote this week in a chapter called Thresholds about the courage to begin difficult conversations:

We limp to wisdom on the hot coals of our mistakes. 

It characterises my learning about ‘management’. It seems ironic to be discovering that this area, one that represents the biggest stretch for me, is now one that I'm most involved with and feel most committed to in terms of developing my work at GWL as well as my work outside the organisation. I am trying to do so keeping creativity as well as values foregrounded. 

Caught up with a really interesting and helpful Mothers of Invention podcast episode this week that underscores how much learning I still have to do. The episode, entitled ‘We may be small, but our impact is huge’ illuminated for me the ways in which young people are both marginalised (most can’t vote on their futures) and leaders in the climate justice movement. The episode was produced by and featured a group of young activists and founders of organisations whose work was awe inspiring but specifically I really appreciated hearing the connections that were made between these global pioneering young leaders, and elder Mary Robinson, the regular host of the podcast who so clearly honours the work done by the Youth Climate Justice Movement and that this is reciprocated. The podcast demonstrates why adult leaders should be talking to and working with young women and explicitly making space for their perspectives and ideas. I was particularly struck by Jamie Margolin’s work, the co founder of Zero Hour by Brianna Fruean, co-founder of 350.org Samoa, and Xiye Bastida co founder of Re-Earth Initiative.


Graffitti, Seattle, 2019

Reflection: Friday 22nd April 2022

shifting, momentum, purposefulness, ethics, ethics of growth


There has been a significant shift in energy and positive momentum this week. I have had opportunities to talk to fledgling and emerging initiatives and felt energised by these discussions. I appreciate the valuable charge that comes from productive dialogues about making, founding and structuring organisations and get so much from participating in the ebb of thoughts and ideas, where the learning is flowing for us all. At this time, I feel a particular sense of purposefulness from being asked to share feminist leadership approaches, talking with colleagues who are forging new initiatives and are at critical stages of change and/or are developing maverick work in academic settings to define what feminist leadership might be. For some, feminism and feminist leadership are wholly unfamiliar, for others the case to open up to this way of working has to be made for other reasons. All challenging discussions are helpful in stress testing for relevance and legitimacy as I develop my own research, methods and writing.

It's great to feel the stretch and to be invited to contribute to projects that are completely new for me. ‘Stretch’ is something I actively log in my journaling as is ‘movement’; when I sense or know that something ‘stuck’ has shifted. There is a doubled sense of hopefulness in knowing when stretch is occurring or I have brought about movement because I know that learning will be happening as a result.  In one of the discussions that I had with a new project, I was asked what might have I done differently? (How much time have you got?) Specifically, what were some key learning points in the past in developing GWL. This led to a discussion about how so many of us who are involved in passion led cultural work initiated their projects or campaigns as a form of compulsion, to address an urgent deficit, an inequality or some injustice, that at those moment of incubation and initiation very few in my experience are thinking about the work involved around consciously shaping the mechanics of leadership or governance. I certainly wasn't thinking critically enough about the concept of leadership for many, many years after Women in Profile started and GWL followed. I think that a minority who are arts educated think about what the challenges might be for them individually or collectively or the tools we will require to develop organisational cultures and or that we will be involved in ‘HR’ in any onerous way or that we will be required to be focused on the way that growth, potential conflict and the dynamics of internal management structures will become core to our working days. I don't know any (co)founders in the cultural sphere where that (the holding and nurturing of an organisation’s chemistry) has been the motivation for creating a new group or project, or anyone who has been chiefly inspired by the prospect of developing ethical leadership principles as a core, critical quality. These are nevertheless imperative elements that require close and ongoing attention not to say bravery and a pioneering approach. I’ve chosen over the last few years to acknowledge that leadership and ‘management’ is not just something that somewhat reluctantly or even regretfully has to happen (somewhere on the spectrum of unnecessary evil and an approach to ensuring sustainability and workplace harmony), but that could be a creative endeavour in itself. Perhaps a reason it is minimised as arts and cultural projects forment is in part that it feels less urgent than the need to work on the external problem to be addressed, the exciting work to be made (the firefighting of the day to day!) but also that it is an often a bafflingly opaque, partially hidden responsibility (where is the institutional or academic training, the debates in the sector…?) and exploring and encountering it can be fear inducing, demoralising and exhausting. It slips sometimes terminally down to the bottom of the overwhelmingly busy to do list.

My feeling now is that getting to grips with Leadership is also vital, purposefulness, pleasurable and challenging…

This week another positive sea change is being reported taking place at the Venice Biennale. It brings me joy knowing that women for the first time predominate after 58 years of the Festival and that many remarkable artists living and lost are gracefully, powerfully and evocatively centred; Alberta Whittle, Sonia Boyce (another creative beacon that featured in my early teaching, alongside that of Ingrid Pollard’s at GSA), Zineb Sedira, Toyen, Liliane Lijn, Claude Cahun, Nan Goldin… an absolute pantheon of talents in what is unequivocally a watershed year. I am under no illusions here about either the industry of art or the shortcomings of the ‘arts Olympics’ (c.f Turner Prize above…) but it is unequivocally uplifting to witness both the art and paradigm shifting in action.

Meantime, in Glasgow I witnessed the fruition of a project that I've been peripherally linked to, the latest in the GSA’s Close of Play Climate Emergency and Creative Action programme. I was struck by the complex paradoxes of this historical moment: when women and formally and historically marginalised makers moved centre stage in Venice, the city for so long an indicator of the climate emergency reaches a tipping point of jeopardy. At this remove the message from the art world gathering in Venice was ambiguous about the environmental catastrophe, as if the stretch would be too great to have a paradigm shift that could encompass both the unequivocal shift to centre women and marginalised creatives alongside a structural and operational addressing of the reality of global climate in/justices and the art world’s relation to it. The environmental theme is evident in curatorial and specific artistic content and the interconnected stressors (colonisation, patriarchy and capitalism) are brilliantly underscored in work across many pavilions but to what extent is this conveyed in the coverage and the promotion/critiques of this and other global ‘cultural pilgrimages’...?

Ellie Harrison, was a presenter at the GSA/GWL/UAL event and I was struck again by the committed nature of her practice specifically her artwork Tonnes of carbon produced by the personal transportation of a ‘a professional artist’ , charting the carbon impact of her travel over the last 15 years. We are all surely challenged on how we can build upon both the long overdue gains we are witnessing at this year’s Bienalle and the challenges of making, curating and collecting as creatives and cultural workers as the world’s environment buckles. Part of our discussion focussed on the ways that the conventional measures of success for both museums and artists is that they will produce more and more and that innovation is synonymous with; growing bodies of new work, making and developing collections and for our buildings to grow. Museums, festivals and cultural resources need to account for the environmental costs of their practices, whether international art loans, international travel, the carbon footprint of their digital activities, their relationship to cultural tourism etc…) At GWL we are continually tempted and feel the demand to create more space for collections, to commission and collect more work and to make available more resources. It will take deep and clear thinking, anchored to our twinned pillars of equality and environmental values to chart a way forward sustainably and ethically. As for the Bienalle 2022 I am still weighing up the options...art abstinance, public transport options Glasgow-Venice- Glasgow and considering setting up a personal annual carbon use limit...

Reflection: Friday 15th April 2022

potentialities, winnowing, testing, flowing, change/inertia

Testing times are ongoing. Covid has been rampant in my network and close to home, the global tumult has ratcheted up with deeply distressing political news each day from Westminster and the Ukraine. For much of the work week I felt like I was buckled into a ‘firefighting whilst bunkered’ mode, reminiscent of the adrenalin fuelled first waves of responding to the virus.

Some positive news countered the day to day challenges, first, Ingrid Pollard’s nomination for the Turner Prize. Notwithstanding my scepticism around prizes and awards, I felt hopeful that further and wider recognition for Ingrid will mean more people discover her work, hear her voice and be provoked and inspired by what they encounter. I have written recently in a yet to be published book chapter about how, in the first humble spaces created to house Women in Profile I had stuck up a postcard of an early Ingrid work, Pastoral Interlude on the ‘office’ wall. This memory was a starting point for a discussion about how an artist’s practice can fuel one’s own creative and activist imagination. Ingrid was and has remained a beacon; I feel hugely fortunate to have worked with her in recent years and found her to be wise, deep thinking (there is always so much to be learned in her company) as well as a maker of prescient, profound work. It’s possible to gain an impression of her approach to working and speaking on this Free Thinking episode. Some of Ingrid’s works created as part of her recent residency at Glasgow Women’s Library can be found on the ArtUk website. 


No Cover Up, flag work by Ingrid Pollard, Glasgow Women’s Library, 2021, photo: Adele Patrick

I've also been cheered by the work that's taking place in the @womenslibrary #GWLat30 project.  Colleagues Rachel Thain Gray, Mae Moss and Nikola Maksymuik are, for the first time, winnowing through the archival history of GWL. It is fascinating and cautionary that even in an archive, museum and library context how quickly things are forgotten, memories and perspectives lost and how critical it is for those involved in pathfinding, activity and countercultural work to have and make records. Critically, resources need to be made available to ensure ‘at risk’ records are preserved and made accessible. The team are currently proposing interesting ways to work with the body of pre-digital work and records, from a period when things were done in fundamentally different ways. I am excited to revisit this period with others through our records and to remember the ways we organised, demonstrated, mobilised volunteers, put the call out for other forms of support that were desperately needed, such as shelving or books and ways to keep premises open and heated without mobile phones, pcs, the internet and social media. That people supported our endeavour and that we survived was a miracle. I am intrigued and have a deep sense of release as this project gently forges distance between my lived experience and GWL as a discrete phenomenon through the careful, thorough and compassionate processes underway of archival interpretation, (re)presentation and historicisation.

I appreciate that I have been the beneficiary of a lifechanging and lifesaving slipstream of support throughout my working and personal life. Longstanding friends such as Charley Barker @skagirl67 still keeps me buoyed with unexpected thoughtful sources and ideas drawn from beyond my regular watering holes. This week, Charley shared a quote from the psychologist Carl Rogers that I found helpful in terms of my thinking around change reflected in last month’s blogging and this month’s resiting of inertia brought on by Covid Times and my relationship to the work unfolding around three decades of GWL.

'a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity, a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material, a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.' from On Becoming a Person, 1956.

Reflection: Friday 8th April 2022

change, shedding, desire, sharing, relinquishing, editing, rethinking

So many loved ones, friends and colleagues have Covid and managing home life and work having remotely has its own particular challenges. I am grateful for the support I have.

I've been thinking this last week about how compassion, clarity around communication and opening up possibilities for kind but honest modes of questioning and requests of myself and others can broker change. I have appreciated so many instances recently of how a request for us to act or work differntly has been taken up willingly and enthusiastically by colleagues and that I am finding myself better able to enact changes in myself.

I was interested to discover (through the Rethinking podcast with Katrina Ridley) an interview with Cait Flanders. She was reflecting on the experiences captured in her book, the Year of Less. Written some years ago Flanders was speaking at some remove about the experience of radically altering her consumption on many registers including giving up alcohol and not buying ‘things’. Of the many enduring aspects of her shift from being an avid consumer to resisting consumption I found it fascinating that the most significant learning point had been discovering that her own aspirations to change were not universally supported by friends. I am interested to think more, from an equalities focus, what change, when it does happen (whether for individuals in workplaces or as organisations) can represent to others, and to keep in mind that change can and does indeed have a huge impact and, or can be existentially threatening. Change in this respect often necessitates a willingness to relinquish habits and all manner of material and immaterial ‘things’ as well as power and control.

As if we need reminding, courage and endurance is required to commit to changing ourselves and to ask it of others.

Reflection: 2nd April 2022

London, art, webs

Seeing art, and being with family and friends in London was uplifting but the city was bitterly cold. London is fully ‘living with Covid’ with all the confusion that entails and the naked inequalities that can sometimes feel inescapable in the Big Smoke made this trip more challenging than in the past. Gatherings felt risky with mask wearing virtually abandoned. I found that several old haunts were boarded up never to reopen. London, like Glasgow seems to be manifesting a sort of diminishing wellspring of grassroots artistic expression, whether in the people you might encounter in the streets or the absence of spontaneously surfacing countercultural art spaces, installations and interventions. Even the graffiti seemed muted.

I was affected by the acute sense of polarized poverty and ostentatious wealth; South Kensington and Knightsbridge are pretty hard to stomach. Maybe I am feeling this more acutely because of the current political discussions that paint a clearer picture of London as the (money) ‘Laundry of the World’ and England as the butler to super wealthy bullies.

I read a great anthology while I was away; Smashing it. working class artists, on life, arts and making it happen, edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. There are some great essays in it that chimed with so much I was experiencing of the capital this time around.  I saw some great exhibitions notably Lubaina Himid at the Tate and Louise Bourgeois at the Hayward. The art was incredibly powerful but I was exasperated by the cost of access at Tate or rather the derisory ‘concession’. Full cost of entry to Lubaina’s show was £16, a concession for students, disabled people, older people and so called ‘job seeking’ people was £15. In her essay entitled Money, Money, Money Brigitte Minamor talks about the idea of the working classes brimming with imagination, and creativity, but underscores what she calls a systemic difficulties and barriers that working class people have to deal with at every stage of the artistic process. She lists applying to funding secure in rehearsal space, the prospects of losing money in the box office, the links and connections that middle and upper class people might have that they can take advantage of, accents, education, location, expectation and so on. She discusses how long it has taken her and how difficult it has been for her to break through as a creative who grew up without money. She advocates for learning how to value ourselves and our work and how the tendency to undervalue one's writing and making is a characteristic of those that have experienced growing up working class and that discovering how absurdly high entitled people rate their work is revelatory. She's challenges us to take on the responsibility to support working class artists to navigate these barriers to push for travel, food and childcare expenses, insert a budget so that we might develop and paying people promptly.

Another great essay is by Lisa Luxx, a queer writer, poet, performer essayist and activist with British Syrian heritage. For Smashing It she has written an essay called ‘The economy of sisterhood’. In it she talks about how alternative economic networks and support mechanisms can be developed amongst working class women. She notes that when you recognise that you belong to one of the groups that doesn't benefit from the state's economic system, it's possible to create a network of sharing what wealth and resources that you have. She offers illustrations of how that's worked for her and her network in the past and also generously shares the gains that she's made. When big organisations invite her for a meeting, she will always use the opportunity to pass on a name and work contact details of at least one of the woman or non binary artists that they should check out and states ‘when you get your foot in the door, prop that shit up’. She offers beautiful examples of the ways that she is ensured that others are benefiting from this alternative, countercultural economic network. For Luxx ‘the aim of the economy of sisterhood is to urge towards a sustainable community that can, over time genuinely provide an alternative to the status quo’. She provides a model of a web of that represents shared responsibility, shared resources and  shared wealth, and I was thinking about this in relation to some of my writing around Organogrammes (visual illustrations of organisations).

Finally, in London I really appreciated reconnecting with my friend Ramaa Sharma. The day before we met she had successfully launched a documentary on Radio 4 Culture on the Couch exploring the importance of cultural literacy in the context of therapeutic services, again a resource that I would recommend. 

Reflection: 25th March 2022

equilibrium, celebration, pausing, joy, aspiration, convalescence

I've been reflecting on what I've been drawn to read so far into 2022 – happily I have been logging my reading more systematically this year on Twitter #BooksReadin2022. Rest, recovery, nature and nurturing health feature strongly. The insights of others hugely influence my work and I’m noting too the impact of talk given by Joy Francis, the pioneering publisher at the National Literature showcase in 2021.  Joy spoke about the idea of a state of ‘perpetual recovery’ for those like herself who were committed to leading change in a context of inequality. The need for (perpetual) recovery has been given little attention, for example in contexts where we might need to recover after training others or where we are continually grappling with in/equality at the heart of our work. Exploring, addressing and learning about inequalities is 
at the core of my work I am gratified that one of the ‘turns’ of late has been an opening up of discussions about how those of us engaged in such work might think about (perpetual) recovery and its links with ideas of convalescence, of pausing and taking care.

The idea of equilibrium is one that I often try and focus on at the start of each day with an aspiration, not that this state will be achieved during the day, or in the future, but that when it does occur, that I will appreciate, notice and cherish it.

Another talismanic morning term is joy.  Reading Clare Hunter's astonishing new book about textiles in the life Mary Queen of Scots, Embroidering her Truth I was delighted to read about Mary’s sense of joyoustie. Jouissance was one of the concepts that was most arresting in my early encounters with French Feminist theory as student at Glasgow School of Art (I was teaching myself, sadly FFT was not on the curriculum!) My understanding of the term was of complex transgressive and excessive forms of enjoyment and pleasure. The idea of moving towards joy, joiestie and jouissance now feels like an even more deeply political act in the face of today’s challenges.

I am feeling buoyed by the idea of taking my first trip to London in well over two years, that I have the support of family and friends (some of whom I will be seeing again during this trip), that I am able to run, walk and breathe deeply and I am celebrating the fact that the Glasgow Women’s Library has got renewed energy and new voices coming through the board and the staff team.

This week the announcement was made that I had become a Fellow of the RSE. I did pause for a moment to appreciate this is a kindness, a public acknowledgement and something that I can celebrate. I take pleasure in the fact that it brings some further wider validation in contexts where it might not have in the past, of the purpose and impact of Glasgow Women's Library and I am very grateful for people who champion my work and that of GWL.

Reflection: 20 March 2022

Tagore, flourishing, intervals, ideas, focus

As light levels have lifted and the sun has shone more regularly (against a backdrop of continuing global turmoil) I am marveling at how these small, incremental naturally occurring changes seem to impact so positively on the behaviour of folks encountered at work and in the street, engendering in many of us renewed confidence, optimism and positivity.

This past week I’ve been looking back on some useful work done as part of the CLiC programme with Joe Lafferty, based on conceptualisations of Leadership developed by Peter Koestenbaum. The opportunities for learning and collaborative work as part of the CLiC and Clore networks have been important enabling me to understand better the scope of work required around cultural leadership in Scotland, in the UK and with international colleagues. Joe had highlighted the critical nature of ethics and of being of service, of nurturing vision, and the bravery required to think big. Courage was also discussed as a quality needed to act with what he called ‘sustained initiative’ alongside having no illusions about the world that we're navigating in. I find it helpful to revisit and find space to check in with learning like this, to see how it might have been of use in the period after training and how it may be adapted to new contexts. I am always curious to note what I have found difficult or impossible to practice or incorporate as a new habit and whether I can fold learning back into thinking and acting today.

In recent years I've been creating space for reflection as much as I am able, and one habit that has stuck is a sort of ‘self inventory’ that I make space for at intervals through the year where I survey and remind myself of some of these tools, gifts, and ways of thinking about the world in order to create perspective on and give myself energy to rally for the next phases of making, thinking and acting.

I've been reading more about (the lost art of) convalescence. I may have mentioned Gavin Francis's book Recovery and through this I came across Victoria Sweet, who has written about Hildegard of Bingen’s mediaeval concept of viriditas. Viriditas offers up a really helpful conceptualization of the healing process as analogous to ‘greening’. Rather than thinking about recovery from injuries through a solely medical lens viriditas suggests a process of being reinvigorated by the same sort of forces that animate trees. Sweet points to the etymological root (in ancient Greek) of physicians been focused on nature and growth.

Francis’s sources on rest and recovery include references to Rabindranath Tagore whose work has much to offer to the central theme of the book. Francis cites Tagore’s thinking that: 'in the rhythm of life, pauses there must be for the renewal of life'. Tagore also speaks about flourishing, and I was interested to think about this term and especially noting that flourishing is cited in the motto of Glasgow. In recent months I've been feeling quite alienated from and disappointed about the degeneration of lifeforce that seems to be blighting the city, it is evident in the physical landscape, the deterioration, dereliction and demolition of some of my favourite buildings and streets and a pervasive sense of melancholy that seems to be afflicting the cityscape. This is perhaps somewhat inevitable, given the years of austerity, and the precarity wrought by Brexit and Covid Times… It seems timely to reflect in my work over the coming weeks and months personally, professionally and politically on what flourishing might mean; to understand more clearly what conditions need to prevail for flourishing to occur, whether personally, in organisational settings or for a city such as Glasgow?

Reflection: 12th March

friendships, compassionate hearing, feelings and needs

Appreciative throughout these ongoing turbulent times of having a longstanding support network and having and taking opportunities to forge new connections with friends and colleagues in ways that are generative and nurturing.

I am so impressed with the way that Sorcha Dallas who is developing the Alasdair Gray archive is working and it was inspiring to discuss our respective archive, visions, ambitions and enterprises. I have felt more so than ever over the past three or four years the critical nature of having and making connections with supportive, understanding and compassionate people, locally and internationally; friends and close and trusted colleagues who create or change things shift the chemistry from inertia to hope. People with whom you can bring your whole self – and has this not become more of the norm during Covid Times and zoomed conversations? As I work on trying to be attentive to the needs and feelings of others, of being actively present and not bringing ‘too much Adele’ I am increasingly curious to differentiate the nuances across the spectrum of being ignored, tolerated, listened to and fully heard and trying as much as possible to spend time when I have it with those who practice the latter. I appreciate that some of the stuff we might carry is unexpressed; fear, anger, frustration, feelings of injustice, and of not being heard in the past…and that this might inform why some of us have felt compelled to build alternatives spaces, places and groups. Passionate feelings lie behind many passion-led projects. Feelings and needs do require conduits, compassionate friendships and other connections in order to be expressed, shared and properly heard as well as being diverted into the fueling of creative, activist and enterprising endeavours. I appreciate everyone who has spent time hearing me over the years and those who have trusted me enough to share their own honest thoughts and feelings with me.

Reflection: 6th March

fear, adaption, solace, inspiration

As the war in Ukraine ratcheted up I was mindful of the impact on the chemistry of all working relationships and the consequent need to adapt and explore how work and life can better function faced with this new reality and the ongoing challenges posed by (people’s real and reasonable fears of) Covid.

Visiting a new museum, Bankfield, brought solace and inspiration (for example, discovering the work of Neesha Tulsi Champaneira, see an example of her work below) as did walks in nature in Hepworth, Yorkshire. 

Reflection: 20th February

lightness, week, weight, wintering, rhythm, breath

Another book filled with topical support has been Wintering by Katherine May. In recent years I have been more consciously resisting deferring rest and recuperation and as I age am now committing to embracing convalescence when necessary. As a sauna devotee I was thrilled to read how important it is to seek out saunas in the winter months. Saunaing, dancing and swimming are there at the top of the things missed along with the company of loved ones in the long Covid years. (May discusses the idea of being 'in sauna' as a state of being). Wintering reminded me how much I crave light there are helpful etymological associations between optical light and the concept of making transparent the ‘weight’ of feminist leadership in a context where feminist values are resisted and devalued. I am drawn to explore how in the current context where mainstream leadership values prevail how feminist leadership can be practiced with weight shed and with a focus on lightness. I am linking this thinking to dance and the necessity of lightness as a precondition– dancing is less possible when one is carrying weighty burdens. Swimming, saunaing and dancing are all activities that take us absolutely away from screens, anxious conversations, thinking and learning and a focus on breathing and the body.

Reflection: 26th February

Failed Leadership, Feminist Leadership, coaching cultures

A week where the palpable failure of global leadership, and in extremis the pathology of toxic masculinity is omnipresent. I am recording this just before going into GWL where we're going to be reflecting on LGBTQ activism and projects over the past three decades in GWL and I feel this is apt as we reckon with the profound threats to freedom and the forms of patriarchal power modelled by Putin, Bolsanaro, Modi, Lukashenko, Trump… In Nirmal Purwar’s discussion with Sara Wahid and Zak Mensah she spoke about feminist leadership working horizontally rather than in the outmoded command and control, vertical model. Horizontally focused leadership in the antithesis to where power is being held, controlled and abused. In as much as momentum can be maintained on changemaking, I felt it was possible to imagine a different future for culture and leadership in discussions with Lindsey Dunbar. We are both committed to ways we can help germinate coaching cultures (Lindsay and Jeanie Scott are developing this initiative and leadership confidence across cultural organisations.

Fascinating to be rereading Denise Mina’s Rizzio ahead of my interviewing her at Paisley Book Festival and noting so many points of reference between the psychopathic dictatorships and febrile religious and political contexts including witch-hunting that were escalating in the 1500s in Scotland and contemporary global politics! At the event, Denise spoke about Trump (and Trump Junior) and their Reformation counterparts and the venal, calculating Putin was never far from our thinking.

The idea of collaborating with feminist leadership initiatives and the building of global constellations of support feels like another vital activity. Links were forged this week with a new colleague Ihitashi Shandilya whose project is part of the constellations of inspiring, positive, people adding ballast to days when there are existential challenges

Reflection: 13th February

recovery, convalescence, ease, cold water, cognition

The rain is relentless and appreciating how much my sense of ease if affected by (lack of) light and sun but at the same time reading more (in Katherine May’s Wintering) about the value of immersing faces and heads in cold water, something I was drawn to doing (counter)intuitively each morning during Covid. May illustrates the therapeutic neurological impacts on cognition. Rest and recovery are so much in the zeitgeist in current feminist approaches to life and work I am encountering and I am struck by the resurgence of interest more widely in ethics of care and recuperation. In his book Recovery (recently added to my ‘rest and other antidotes to punishing productivity’ reading list) I am interested to note that Gavin Francis calls convalescence a ‘lost art’ and a vital combination of ‘science and kindness.’

Reflection: 5th February 2022

feeling, coaching, movement, hope

The ongoing dreichness and an injury has been casting a pall over strands of life and work activities.  I have been collaborating with others for many years to try to realise an ambition that amounts to creating and living in affordable, green and secure housing. Housing where myself and other householders have agency in the design and brief. Since first working on Four Walls, Take Root and now Raising the Roof the going has been relentlessly tough and the resistance constant (to women-led housing, to green housing, to self-build, to wooden housing in Scotland, to housing for elders, to accessing land and finance, to finding/forging an equitable financial model…). This, even now as we seek to create housing for elders in the face of the perfect storm of a Climate Emergency, an ageing demographic, the palpable failure of the existing housing options and the sharpening of focus on the broken nature of the current care home culture in Covid Times. I am buoyed by the support we have had so far in Raising the Roof especially the Voices of Experience Team to create our vision and hope that as 2022 gets into gear that there will be shifts from the current wintery hiatus.

It has been imperative in the seemingly interminable greyness cast by the weather and the virus to try and shift the energy. Being coached and delivering coaching myself reminds me of the possibilities afforded by sitting in an accepting way with the unfathomable and to sense ‘the void’ as a ‘fertile’ one. I am choosing to focus on all the small pleasures I can take in nature itself and in reading and learning about it (after Robin Wall Kimmerer’s astonishing Gathering Moss I am now deep into Merlin Sheldrake’s mind-altering Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds   Also buoyed by catching Joan Eardley alongside a great museum intervention Kill Your Darlings, by Anthony Schrag at Perth Museum and Art Gallery (and coincidently and fortuitously to working with Anthony and his students at GWL this month). I optimistically booked tickets for shows for the first time in Covid Times and am noting with great relief lighter mornings and evenings enabling less restrictions on running and walking.

It was uplifting to hear Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah being interviewed by Nirwal Puwar who have created the latest in the Space Invaders Feminist Leadership podcast series. Sarah and Zak are pioneering joint CEO’s of Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries. I have long believed in the benefits of co-directed leadership and shared roles (we have several examples of this at work at GWL including shared senior management) and it was fascinating to learn more from Sara and Zak reflecting on their experiences of co-leading at a large UK cultural institution.

Reflection: 24th January 2022

organisation, working, great, felt, feminist coaching, cleaning, meeting, positive responses, introducing, nurture, challenging, developing, interested, experiences

Appreciating this week how much I derive deep purposefulness and joy from feedback that my coaching efforts are yielding positive change for others. Their changes are entirely as a result of their work and commitment to shift from ‘stuckness’ but being able to hold the space for people and witness where movement is happening is such an uplifting experience. Their stretch and movement facilitates my own. This week I have been consciously expanding my network of 'go to' people, seeking out perspectives and wisdom from others. I found Moose Heads on the Table by Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill a great read.

I am exploring the ways I can develop feminist thinking around the idea they cite of Daniel Ofman’s of core quality quadrants.

I received the beautiful hard copy of Oncurating journal this week.

Great reading and amazing contributors. I am grateful to have been invited to write a chapter and that I had the opportunity collaborate with colleagues Nandita, Merete and Althea. It came together in really challenging times last year; whilst focusing on what learning there may be from leading cultural organisations over 30+ years I benefitted greatly from hearing the voices of other feminist elders at a time when turbulence was the order of the day.

 Reflection: 16th January 2022

pace, preparedness, thought, work, collaboration, conduct, clarity, feelings


Learning this week about ways I can ensure that I execute a demand I have been making of myself to say no to work that is not nourishing for me and/or will not be impactful in terms of making real change. My intuition is a guide, signaling when saying yes might lead to feelings that my care, knowledge and experiences will be ‘extracted’ rather than synergizing with others with whom I may choose to work. I have friends and colleagues who are helpfully navigating life and work in the same vein. Equalities work in collaboration needs to take place in the right time and place and with open hearts and honest intention. Being clear and decisive in saying no can still risk receiving a shocked or angry response. I recognize my need to become more practiced in communicating, ensuring that I craft my responses with care and compassion and articulate (even more) clearly and what is at stake personally and politically.

I have started placing my daily grounding words within my field of vision when zooming and have noted how these help colour my day. 



Another no is required; the rationale in this instance is that saying yes will not bring me closer to the sense of joy and satisfaction and forward momentum I am seeking in my non GWL work. For some time, and in discussions with colleagues I've been working on slowing the pace and deepening reflection. My metaphor has been thinking of my labour in the workplace as if on a running machine that has been set just above my comfort zone (in years past it was at comedy levels of speed with the inevitable consequences). Part of my own succession planning thought processes means an aim to steadily and comfortably move off the running machine. I know what it feels like literally to do this at speed and want instead for the pace to be slow enough for me to step onto another pathway without dizziness or injury.  This week, writing about the ‘weight’ of feminist leadership, and reading Amy Gear’s piece ‘The Weight of Activism’ in We Axe for What We Want I understood clearly that the process is about slowing the pace and shedding the weight. The Weight of Feminist Leadership has been a core aspect in my research and writing for some time but only this week did I conceptualize this as something I need to pay attention to in this way. This is something that I can do now, not when I choose to leave GWL (when the time comes). That time is not when I lay the weight down, I can start shedding the weight now.

I have been thinking about Alice McKenzie, humanitarian and librarian who died this week. Alice clearly had a sense of her time, as a formidable elder, coming to an end, and was or seemed to have felt satisfied with her life and prepared for it ending (to have made good plans for her funeral ceremony and to have written her autobiography). At her funeral she was remembered as a person who ‘looked up’ at nature, at the wider world to others with whom she shared the planet. She was remembered as someone dealing with the immediate and the quotidian but also the global and the grounding, humbling vastness of nature. Alice’s life lesson a gift at the start of the year.

Reflection: 7th January 2022

nurturing, ebb and flow, feeling, noticing, behaviour, blue skies, movement, sensing

It’s the final week of a long winter break I've had quite a lot of progress in my ongoing effort to ‘nurture my emerging self’, and specifically giving myself more time to focus on who I might be beyond GWL. I've been happily and enthusiastically working on a book project for the past several months. One thread involves creating and interpreting transcriptions a year’s worth of weekly recordings made during 2021. It has been interesting and unexpectedly emotional; I couldn’t have anticipated the scale of the challenges of 2020 of Covid, of periods of ill health, unforeseen protracted work challenges and a need to dig deep on an existential level, in particular how to model leadership in such uncharted waters added to the milestones of GWL’s 30th anniversary and my own 60th birthday. Working with your thoughts and voice as material means a critical noting of your verbal ticks, of the words that you constantly overuse; in my case discovering the ways I self sabotage and diminish through overuse of ‘sort ofs’ and ‘justs’ but also, more encouragingly I spot the persistence of the terms ‘sensing’ and ‘sense’ of ‘noting’ and ‘noticing’. So, what are some key things I noted and sensed? Ebbs and flows; the ebbing and flowing of my own life, sometimes groundswell waves that can be positive and negative and the shifting energies of those I encounter and how these dynamics create turbulence, precipitate change and momentum. The impact of both on me physically and mentally, is often strikingly evident in my voice – the sighs when the weight and pace have been punishing and the resurgent tidal rise of energy such as after a ‘nature fix’ or the counsel of a kind and wise friend, colleague or family member.


I'm looking out now across a snowy balcony to blue skies – and how helpful the knowledge of the constancy of the sky is when dark clouds are massing and seem interminable.  As I approached the final weekend of this break I noted with interest that the ‘back to work’, sinking feeling that I have experienced unbidden since school isn’t there. Could this be a sign that I have grown up at 60 years of age, that the conscious effort to Fear Less and be Care Free has become habitual? Working on my website with Mae has involved some specific and helpful introspection, writing a self defining biog, thinking about who I am, how I work, reflecting on and summarizing the labours of the past and how my life is ballasted by the thinking and support of others.

Reflection: 31st December 2021 - 29th January 2022 

equilibrium, surfacing, joy, turbulence, moving, growing, nurturing, life, learning, renewal, oversight

I'm in a more than usually reflective mode given that the new year starts tomorrow and one of the things that has surfaced is the idea, the challenge of taking the necessary time not just to note the need for but to create the necessary space and time to embed learning and of trying to keep an equilibrium whilst change and challenge is the order of most days. For the past three years I have been more consciously committed to welcoming and making change my life. Change has undoubtedly happened and I want to continue to make shifts at a rate that is sustainable. I have been active this past year specifically on not just thinking about myself as a sum of, or ruled by emotions, but the idea of my body and my mind moving through time, moving through challenges, and open to learning. In a deliberate series of discussions and work at the year’s end I have asked myself What do I want to do? and four nodes were foregrounded. They sound very simple, but are critically important to me, and I acknowledge them as lifelong passions. They are: to be more proactively involved in meaningful, impactful satisfying and joyful (collaborations with people that involve) creativity, writing, arts and coaching. I am now committed to exploring where these strands productively intersect for me in my ongoing practice/s within and outside GWL.


A tool in my daily annual reflective practice over the past 3 years has been using year wallcharts, to deliberately track inter/actions. I note instances of ‘movement’ in all respects, from exercise to mental ‘stretch’, seeking out discussions with ‘go to’ people and logging when I visit new places and see new things. This tracking can be illuminating; having felt in the past that friends and family connections might not be happening as frequently as I thought they could be I can see, casting my eye over the year’s wallchart that interactions with both have occurred virtually every day over the past year. I can also see how much this nurturing of self is reliant on and indebted to connecting with others.