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Untitled (from The Masterpiece Part 4 - A Weekend In The Country) -- Olivia Plender

Untitled (from The Masterpiece Part 4 – A Weekend In The Country) — Olivia Plender

From The Masterpiece Part 4 – A Weekend In The Country, 2005 by Olivia Plender (b. 1977)

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For the past few months, Arnolfini volunteer Becky Williams has been exploring texts in the Reading Room. An encounter with Olivia Plender's 'A Stellar Key to the Summerland' (Book Works, 2007) led her on a search for related works from within the library. Here's her response to what she read.

I’ve been working on this piece about Victorian Spiritualism, suffragettes, possession, passivity and feminism in horror for the past few months while volunteering in Arnolfini’s Reading Room. Today the gallery published it on their blog which is really exciting. The Reading Room has a fantastic little collection of books, artist books and resources which are available for the public to come in and peruse during exhibitions. Olivia Plender’s artist books A Stellar Key To The Summerland and The Suffragette As Militant Artist, as well as academic texts in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Analysis, History by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott and A Voice And Nothing More by Mladen Dolar all informed this text and my continued research into women and the supernatural.

‘The role of medium provided a unique situation in which those without a public voice, such as working women, could give political speeches to large gatherings without being seen to transgress too many social boundaries, in the guise of channeling a spirit.’

– Olivia Plender, A Stellar Key to the Summerland, 2007.

A question I have been considering for a long time is whether the female monster – in her various incarnations in film, literature, mythology and history – can be considered feminist, or in some way valuable to the feminist cause. This is something I feel has often been taken for granted as it usually seems rather simplistically to be boiled down to the idea of ‘powerful women’: women who, rather than representing the traditionally upheld concept of passive, submissive femininity, instead take on a violent and aggressive role more associated with masculinity and therefore power. Olivia Plender’s books on the Victorian Spiritualist movement and suffragettes, therefore, caught my interest as they provide another angle on the relationship between women, the supernatural, and power. The above passage is especially poignant: rather than the violent acts committed by women in rape-revenge slasher films, or by female serial killers of the past who have become romanticized icons of female power, the female mediums of the Spiritualist movement used the performance of supernatural talents to give themselves a voice, and subsequently some modicum of political power. Perhaps, as I will argue in this text, they even played on their perceived passivity in order to facilitate the illusion...