Lily van der Stokker's "non-shouting feminism"

you lily is a dutch artist and she's based between acts to them in New York um she first came to prominence I guess at the beginning of the 90s when she was living in New York and initially she ran a small local artists run gallery space and then she began making work and exhibiting through the beginning of the nineties and through the 90s a lot of the works that we're showing here and take some Ives seem very either very engaging they're very mature p in some ways some of them his work is about some not exactly darker but some others other aspects of life so she's made work about paying the rent made work about money economics falling out with people you know who works very much about everyday life in about her life um but what we wanted to do here was again we thought you know it's the summer season you know we're on the beach and so the exhibition is called no big deal thing and we tried to bring together a selection of her works that really do look for that aspect of the things that seem really banal and seem really silly or nothing e or or like no big deal but in actual fact are the things that we can all relate to because they're all part of our life there are about friends they're about families are about having a party they're about doing some DIY on the house and so this exhibition is really celebrating that respective at work I think Lilly OS begins making her work with these these small drawings that she made some on paper and we've got over 49 50 I think those drawings that have been made over the last 25 years so there's a really amazing range these of these stories that she's been producing and they're very much like little doodles or very childlike naive looking floorings and many of them are designs and that almost all of them a designs for these bigger all paintings some of which hit made and some of which always stays as drawings but there's something really amazing in the way that these various these very relaxed childlike drawings using Crayola and felt tip pen of them get turned into these incredibly precise but sometimes monumental and the paintings are made with such care and precision they're almost the absolute opposite to the drawing so as against something very interesting that happens in that transition she's also spoken you know at length about about being a woman in the art world and about what it means to make work as a woman and to make the kind of work that she's making as a woman in the art world and I think she's increasingly being seen as a really important figure in a kind of feminist and post-feminist context because you know the way that she uses decoration and pattern and the way that she uses domestic furniture you know so furs and poor children's chairs and tables all of these things as soon as the antithesis of serious are they will belong to the world of decoration of interior dec or design or or you know the home the domestic space and so I think there's something really extraordinarily provocative and strong about the way that she brings those things into the gallery Lily did an interview recently with um John Waters the American filmmaker and artist and he's also a big fan of Lynn his work than a collector of her work and again John was was thinking about some of these other languages that Lily sort of appropriates in some way and he asked the question he said that you a minimalist intellectual and Lily gave this great response she said no I'm not a minimalist intellectual I'm a FEMINIST conceptual pop artist and I just think in a way that absolutely sums up for work