Final Essay

Unravelling A Feminine Line: The Art of Undoing, Reclaiming, and Redefining Feminine Expression

Figure 1. Karen Covic, Shroud, 2024.

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Unravelling A Feminine Line:

The Art of Undoing, Reclaiming, and Redefining Feminine Expression.

This essay looks to explore methodologies of making and unmaking within an abstract process of accumulated layers of addition and subtraction, reframed as a textile

surface. Considering notions of palimpsest, and the deconstruction of mythic

narratives on women, there are questions of how to transform conventions of abstract

painting through revealing art processes as a labour that favours a female domestic

experience and in doing so, could serve to rework lost female narratives within art

discourse.

In the context of this essay, palimpsest refers to the discernible layers of previous

workings-out by female artists that have been overwritten or deliberately eIaced across

generations. In her influential essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”,

Linda Nochlin identifies “the unconscious domination of a white male subjectivity” as

an intellectual distortion that shapes the way we view history and demands correction

through feminist critique.

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from

which they have been driven away… Woman must put herself into the text – as into the

world and into history – by her own movement.1

French feminist critic, Hélène Cixous, wrote of ‘women writing women’ back into

historical discourse, a term she described as écriture féminine, in her essay, “The Laugh

of the Medusa,

” in 1976.2 Since the 1970s, there has been a sustained interest across

disciplines to rework and reclaim the female narrative, especially relevant to my work is

the deconstruction of popular myths, giving voice to the women written out of the

narrative, which I examine through a variety of literary influences.

Cixous also describes how ‘a woman is never far from mother’, that within her there is

always ‘a little of that good mother’s milk’, and therefore she writes in white ink.3 The

notion of white ink evokes the mother’s nurturing role in breastfeeding the infant, while

1 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medussa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875.

2 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,”875.

3 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,”881.

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simultaneously referencing the historical invisibility of women’s writing and female

subjectivity. As a woman born in the 1970s, I was witness to the progress made by the

second-wave feminist movement, kick-started by the writings of women such as

Nochlin and Cixous. I then experienced the emergence of third-wave feminism

throughout my early working life and adulthood. Now, as a mother of a teenage

daughter — amid the reemergence of a dominant white male subjectivity in

contemporary politics, and movements such as #MeToo — a renewed emphasis on

social consciousness and feminist critique needs to continue. We look back to move

forward; to keep moving forward.

In my practice, and that of other artists featured, I explore how the act of layering —

constructed of a process of addition and subtraction — can embody the feminist project

of re-examining history. This process of revealing, reclaiming, and redefining becomes a

means of engaging with the traces of women’s creative labour that have been

overwritten or dismissed. I discuss how the creative process itself becomes both the

subject and the form of the work, echoing the rhythms of domestic labour — repetitive,

cyclical, and sustaining — through which many female artists continue to negotiate their

dual roles within art and home and how this works to transform conventions of abstract

painting.

PALIMPSEST

As artists we come with a personal history, a pattern or a weave. We are palimpsest,

layered with historical, political and sociocultural reference, and as female artists, the

pattern, the grid, the cage, has mostly been restrictive. Artist Julie Mehretu’s prose

poem, Notes on Painting, reads like a downloaded stream of consciousness detailing

her approach to her creative process. It introduced me to the notion of ‘palimpsest’

- a

manuscript from which the original text has been erased and reused for a new one,

though traces of the earlier writing remain visible - as contrasted with ‘tabula rasa’ - a

blank slate. This notion of palimpsest has instructed my practice, and as a way of

rethinking abstract painting.

4 I wrote my own response to Mehretu’s prose poem,

entitled Notes on (How to make a) Painting, which I include in parts in this essay

however, these are the opening lines to Mehretu’s poem:

Push, scratch, mark, cut, stay.

4 Julie Mehretu, “Notes on Painting,” in Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, eds., Painting beyond

Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition (Berlin: Steinberg Press, 2016), 271-277.

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A mark, a scratch, the sound of graphite, on paper, ink gliding out of nib pulled by fibres,

in the paper, on the surface of acrylic, like stone, like parchment, never tabula rasa

always palimpsest.

….

Find the break, the gap, the fissures, undoing and pulling apart –

Mehretu’s, Notes on Painting, identifies the canvas also as palimpsest, she works to

redefine painting by reinscribing narratives, historical, cultural, and architectural,

through layers of addition and subtraction, mark-making and erasure (see fig.2).

Figure 2. Julie Mehretu, Empirical Construction, Istanbul, 2003.

Mehretu is looking to visually disrupt the grids of urban planning, to find the fissures

and pull them apart for it is in the reveal that the energy and engagement come to

the fore. David Joselit in his essay, “Reassembling Painting,” describes how

contemporary artists are involved in an “investigation of how marks, or gestures

occupy the space between subjects and objects or between people and things”.

Mehretu’s paintings are all about communities and the narratives within, whether a

stadium, (see fig.3) or capital city, (see fig.4). They are concerned with the macro and

5 Julie Mehretu, “Notes on Painting,” in Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, eds., Painting beyond

Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, 271-277.

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the micro-narrative, of undoing it, reclaiming it, and redefining it, so that the overall

result is a generative force.

Paradoxically, the construction of [her] paintings [are] like a series of erasures, each

stage eradicating the last…. however, history is not rubbed out. Rather it is

reinscribed. Erasure operates not as a destructive but as a generative force.6

Figure 3. Julie Mehretu, Stadia, 2004.

6 Siemon Allen, “Destruction/Construction,” in Julie Mehretu: City Sittings exh.cat (Detroit: Detroit

Institute of Arts, 2007), 51.

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Figure 4. Julie Mehretu, Berliner Platz, 2008-9.

THE GRID

My first line of enquiry began with making and unmaking of the grid. To disrupt the grid

through a process of unravelling, its characteristics should first be defined. Piet

Mondrian was a proponent of the grid, and through his Neoplasticism theory, looked to

achieve aesthetic purity by reducing the canvas to a tabula rasa (clean slate), with a set

of distinct, basic, painting rules (see fig.5). According to Rosalind Krauss, the grid

announced “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to

discourse” presented as “endgame painting.

”7 However, when breaking painting down

into its constituent parts, the illusion is lost, and painting becomes more object than

subject and in being rendered silent, the narrative or discourse is lost.9 Visually,

Mondrian’s grid oIered a static, “locked down composition” splitting up the canvas like

a dissection of painting itself.

10 However, an introduction of the double line, suggested

by British female artist, Marlow Moss, (see fig.6) served to activate areas rather than

7 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50: Jared Earnest, interview with Judy Millar,

Brushstrokes in Documents, ed. Michael Lett (Auckland: Michael Lett Publishing, 2023), 331.

9 Ernest, interview with Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, 330.

10 Lucy Howarth as quoted by Jessica Schouela, “Marlow Moss: Transgender and the Double Line,”

Women Artists Journal 39, no. 2 (2018): 35.

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carve them up, and re-introduced an energy by weaving intersecting areas of the canvas

together, reestablishing dialogue.11

Figure 5. Piet Mondrian, Composition II, 1930

Figure 6. Marlow Moss,

White and Yellow, 1935.

Alongside painted grids, I explored the histories of handwoven tapestries, the first

examples of wall-hung art, that are made up of horizontal and vertical grid lines in

construction through the loom, through warp and weft. This grid pattern also translates

into the woven pattern in canvas and fabrics I used. Tapestries showcase considerable

technical skill in replicating historical and mythical narratives, (see fig.7) but I was

particularly drawn to the back face which shows evidence of the labour involved, the

workings-out, with a mass of loose threads, knots, and repair stitching hidden from view

(see fig.8&9). In my July 2024 and 2025 seminar, I showed hanging grid tapestries (see

fig.10,11&12).

11 AH Nijhoa as quoted by Schouela, “Marlow Moss: Transgender and the Double Line,”35.

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Figure 7.

Detail from Ulysses and Circe from the Story of Ulysses,

Brussels, c. 1550-65

Figure 8. detail from 16th century

Oudenaarde tapestry,

front face.

Figure 9. detail from 16th century

Oudenaarde tapestry,

back face.

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Figure 10. Karen Covic, Tapis, July 2024. Figure 11. Karen Covic, Untitled, July 2024.

Figure 12. Karen Covic, Penelope, July 2025.

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My desire to disrupt the constraints of the grid pattern was sparked after reading this

paragraph from Janet Frame’s novel, Owls Do Cry, which spoke of undoing or unravelling

an unwanted pattern. It was about a desire to redefine the unsanctioned, muddled

pattern that life had knitted within into some ‘dreamed neatness’

12 A possibly

unrealistic ideal of neatness but a dream, nonetheless, of taking back control of the

narrative.

the way someone who is knitting will pull at the threads to make a hole, but [they] tried

to pick and unpick something inside [themself] that every year of being alive had knitted,

with the pattern, the purl and plain of time gone muddled and diGerent from the

dreamed neatness.13

There has been much reworking of mythic narratives in the publishing world recently,

which has extended my enquiry into Homer’s Penelope in The Odyssey. In Emily

Hauser’s, Mythica: A history of Homer’s world, through the women written out of it, Mary

Beard declares that the first example in Western literature of a man telling a woman to

“shut up” appears in this epic poem. Telemachus, Penelope’s son, refuses to ‘hear his

mother out’ and commands her to get back to her ‘daily duties and her loom’ and leave

the speeches to the men.

15 Hauser works to redress the balance, and these literary

retellings oIer up present-day examples of ‘women writing women’ back into historical

narrative, of écriture féminine.16

ART AS LABOUR, LABOUR AS ART

In her 2003 essay Work Ethic, Helen Molesworth discusses the shifting nature of labour

in post-World War II American society, as the economy transitioned from an industrial to

a service-based model. At this time, New York had emerged as the epicentre of the art

world, and this broader socio-economic shift gave rise to questions regarding the

changing role of the artist. Central to these discussions were debates around

authorship and the increasingly prominent role of the viewer. Artists such as Frank

12 Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry, (Christchurch, NZ: Pegasus Press, 1957), 145.

13 Frame, Owls Do Cry, 145.

15 Emily Hauser, Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It (London:

Doubleday/Transworld Publishers, 2025), 3.

16 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medussa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875.

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Stella and Andy Warhol — particularly through Warhol’s Factory studio — produced

work that was deliberately commodified and drew on references to the everyday as with

Stella’s house paint and brushes, and Warhol’s imagery, mimicking the rise of mass-

produced consumer items which, it was argued, art had now become (see fig.13&14).

Figure 13. Andy Warhol,

(detail) Soup Cans, 1962.

Figure 14: Hollis Frampton, untitled from The

Secret World of Frank Stella, 1958–1962.

Questions arose around the definitions of artistic labour, with the artist positioned

ambiguously as both worker and manager. However, most of these discussions around

labour and art, did not apply to the female artist. “Woman as manager and worker [did]

not apply to domestic tasks and child rearing.”18 The notion of the ‘artworker’ also

emerged, but what of the domestic worker as artist? Was the labour involved in making

art inherently 'useless' when compared to more conventionally productive tasks — such

as digging a ditch?19 (see fig.15). Perhaps — but only if that ditch served a purpose; if it

did not, then its value was equally open to question. What about tasks like washing

dishes, vacuuming the house, sweeping the floor, if carried out by an artist? Domestic

tasks are unpaid and undervalued, they are not useless, but they are essential and

sustaining, albeit repetitive, physical, and generally unseen –– but they constitute work,

nonetheless.

18 Helen Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen Molesworth (Baltimore Museum of

Art/University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 43.

19 Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” 41, discussing Chris Burden’s Honest Labour, (1979).

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Figure 15. Chris Burden, Honest Labour, 1979.

Leo Steinberg in his 1968 lecture, Other Criteria, stated that the ‘new art’ presents itself

as work not art and therefore needs to be analysed diIerently. The criteria surrounding

Modernism, defined most notably by Clement Greenberg, needed reviewing as more

flexibility was needed. The new art of Postmodernism, had to be critiqued in

sociocultural terms as well as in traditional art discourse.20 Steinberg also introduced

the concept of the flat-bed picture plane, moving the ‘canvas’ oI the easel and down

onto the floor, viewed, not with your head held aloft but down on the ground with the

everyday.

21 It signaled the democratisation of art making, in making it more accessible

for the working class and women. In my own work, I worked with tablecloth imagery to

recreate the horizontal, surface in a domestic environment (see fig.16).

Figure 16. Karen Covic, work in progress on tablecloth imagery on canvas.

20 Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1972).

21 Steinberg, “Other Criteria”.

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This shift in the definition of labour and its relationship to art, and the call for critical

flexibility made space for feminist artists to make the once invisible ‘woman’s work, ’

visible. Performance art pieces by artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s

Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, Outside, 1973, (see fig.17&18) and Martha Rosler’s,

Backyard Economy, 1974 (see fig.19&20) transformed everyday (unpaid) domestic

chores to something of a commodity: the commodity being the act of working, often

carrying out repetitive tasks such as washing steps, hanging out washing, and mowing

lawn.

Figure 17 Still from Mierle Laderman Ukelels,

Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, Outside, 1973.

Figure 18. Still from Mierle Laderman Ukelels,

Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, Outside, 1973.

Figure 19. Still from Martha Rosler,

Backyard Economy 1, 1976.

Figure 20. Still from Martha Rosler,

Backyard Economy 1, 1976.

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THE FEMALE DOMESTIC EXPERIENCE

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife.

I am a mother. (Random order).

I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc.

Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art.

Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to

consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.

(II, A. Personal Part: 1-7)22

In her 1969 manifesto, Ukleles set out her declaration that as a female artist, with the

newly acquired role of motherhood, she was required to shift the focus of her creative

output to the domestic.23 She is an artist and this is the work she now does; it is labour,

it is not useless, it is valuable; it is Maintenance Art. Unless a woman decided not to

marry or not have children, which many female artists did, there was a new discussion

to be had.

Drawing on references from song lyrics as well as other literature, I was struck by this

song from the album, Dance Fever, by Florence + the Machine, 2024, in which a female

artmaker discusses the pressures she feels to get married and have children, when

instead she refers to herself as an Odysseus type character: ambitious, going to war,

reveling in self-mythology –– not feminine characteristics as we know them from our

sociocultural standpoint in the patriarchal West. To make her art, the singer rejects

marriage and motherhood, declaring herself not queen but King.

[Verse 1]

We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children

About the world ending and the scale of my ambition

And how much is art really worth?

But you need your rotten heart, your dazzling pain like diamond rings

You need to go to war to find material to sing

I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king

[Chorus]

I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing

My empty hall to echo with grand self-mythology

I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king

I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king24

22 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, (1969), 3.

23 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside,” YouTube, video, 5:49, July 23, 1973,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIhf3UBNTlA.

24Florence Welch, Jack Antonoa, “King,” track 1 on Dance Fever, by Florence + the Machine, streamed,

Polydor, 2022.

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In response to Mehretu’s Notes on Painting, I wrote out verbs as an approach to artmaking and

the domestic situation I found myself in:

Door closes. Kids gone. Dog walked. A Wash on.

Time to think, time to make = studio time. THINK! Enter that room where there is room

to think. The studio at the back of the house. Enter and close the door. Un-pause the

discussions in your head. But be quick. Think quick, quickly even.

Pace the room, lay out canvas, dampen, mix, pour, guide, direct, protect. Assess. Mop

up a bit. Needs time to dry.

…

PUSH – be brave, I want to do something extra-ordinary! But where is my voice, what am

I trying to say. I’m not actually sure. I just need to do this. Speak up. I feel a bit numb. I

feel a bit dumb. Push through. Go and put the kettle on, what are we going to have for

dinner? Quick sweep the kitchen floor. Too many pets & dark wood floors. Must get back

to the room but the wash cycle has STOPPED. It will get very creased if left.

“Kill the Angel in the House. ”25

(1-17)26

Figure 21. Mockup installation for my final exhibition.

25 Virginia Woolf, “Killing the Angel in the House, ” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York:

Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1942).

26 Karen Covic, “Notes on (How to make a) Painting,” 2025.

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Figure 22. Temporary use of my clothes racks for drying washing.

LABOUR AS ART, ART AS LABOUR

American artist, Ann Hamilton has a multi-disciplinary practice and frequently uses

everyday materials, labour and human presence or interaction in her work. I first came

across Hamilton when reading about Judy Millar’s visit to her studio in an interview in

Documents, where she helped unpick red rag clothes for a MOMA installation piece.

However, in the installation piece, Indigo Blue,1991, (see fig.23&24) Hamilton

reinvigorates discussions around labour and art, by literally acting out the domestic

labour process of sorting and folding clothes. The artist and her team layered second-

hand work clothes into a huge indigo-blue mound, and this became an important part of

the artwork preparation. Then an attendant performs the same task throughout the

exhibition. Hamilton recounts how this was an afterthought once delivery had been

made: the repetitive folding recalling the invisible or undervalued domestic, manual

work done by women, and enslaved people. She elevates the historical narrative of

labour imbued in those clothes, where the scale makes it very visible. This might be

construed as another way for ‘women writing women’ back into historical discourse.

27 Jared Earnest, interview with Judy Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, ed. Michael Lett (Auckland:

Michael Lett Publishing, 2023), 339-340.

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Figure 23. Ann Hamilton, Indigo Blue, 1991-2007. Figure 24. Ann Hamilton, Indigo Blue, 1991-2007.

David Joselit in Painting 2.0, describes how artistic labour has been re-organised in

abstract art. The labour element has become aesthetic labour, conceptual, and

cognitive, where making choices and decisions replaces manual labour and

technical skill.28 However, the labour element is being re-introduced with

contemporary female artists such as Judy Millar, who describes getting physically

involved in the painting like a cleaning process, “running [her] hands through the

paint or scraping it off with rags” .

29 (see fig.25)

28 David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself’” in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, ed. Manuela

Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit (Munich/London/New York: Prestel/DelMonico Books,

2016), 170.

29 Earnest, interview with Judy Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, 331.

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Figure 25. Judy Millar, Swallowed in Space, 2017.

Similarly, with Anoushka Akel’s 2022 exhibition Wet Physics (see fig.26) Selina Ershadi

writes of the artist’s process as being physical labour:

Anoushka’s process is a material engagement of layer, line and erasure that is both

sensual and arduous; delicate yet crude. Pressing, sanding, scratching, rubbing,

smearing, scraping, she applies layer upon layer … to the canvas, sometimes

weathering away the surface from the outset or in between applications to faintly

reveal what remains beneath, then building back up again.

30 Selina Ershadi,

Michael Lett Publishing, 2023), 141.

“Anoushka Akel: How Does it Start the Sea, ” in Documents, ed. Michael Lett (Auckland:

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Figure 26. Anoushka Akel, Wet Physics, 2021.

Ershadi’s review uses “the language of work as opposed to that of art”, with sanding,

scratching, smearing, and scraping – conjuring images of a printing press, a

plasterer, a carpenter, a bricklayer.

31 It is a repetitive, cyclical motion,

“rubbing out

as a process of adding and subtraction: a build-up of cancellation”

32 It is the manual

labour involved in the layering that Akel is showing us, the labour is more

tradesperson than a domestic here, but she is trying to make the surface work, she is

showing us her way of “how to make a painting” .

Akel’s later exhibition, Carrying the Beast, 2024, “[was] a result of time and space

afforded to Akel” , a veritable Room of One’s Own, as discussed by Virginia Woolf in

her essay of the same name, after a residency at Parehuia McCahon House.34 In

some of her paintings she mimics Anne McCahon’s medical journal illustrations,

which “served as both paid employment and artistic practice” , although it is known

31 Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” 25.

32 Tacita Dean, “A Panegyric,” in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate

Publishing/D.A.P., 2008), 35.

33 Dean, “A Panegyric,”, 35.

34 Michael Lett exhibition catalogue: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and

Company, 1929).

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that Anne willingly gave up her artist career to support her husband, Colin, in his.

The labour that Akel is showing us here is the burden of a woman as load-bearing

structure (see fig.27) set amongst images of branches and trunks of local Kauri (see

fig.28). It is an example of how painting can work as the transmission of narratives, and

how women write women back into art discourse. What follows is from the catalogue

review by Victoria Wynne-Jones:

To touch, to hold, to carry. Akel addressees the questions of how painting can be

employed to bestow attention and care upon the people, objects and entities that

surround her. … It is here that storytelling; the rudimentary and accumulative

transmission of narratives becomes an act of survival. … it is the load bearing structure

that remain: trunks, branches, those with the capacity to provide relief…she who carries

the beast.36

Figure 27. Anoushka Akel, Carrying the Beast (lignin), 2024.

35 Frances Morton, “The Power of Two: The woman behind Colin McCahon, ” Metro, Dec 26, 2016,

http://www.metromag.co.nz/arts/art/the -power-if-two-the-woman-behind-colin-mccahon.

36 Victoria Wynne-Jones, “Anoushka Akel: Carrying the Beast,

” in Carrying the Beast, Anouska Akel, ed.

Michael Lett (Auckland: Michael Lett Publishing, 2024).

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Figure 28. Anoushka Akel, Commune, 2024.

“So, Muse: tell me about a woman. ”37

“I shall speak about women’s writing; about what it will do.”38

THE UNDOING

So, by day she’d weave at her great and growing web –

by night, by the light of torches set beside her,

she would unravel all she’d done.

(2.98-100)39

Peter Shand makes the connection between Homer’s Penelope and Judy Millar, (born

Penelope Judy Millar, coincidently) in his 1999 essay, “If I were Penelope.

” He describes

Millar’s field of investigation as the “making and unmaking of art objects and both the

visual signs and the experiences they can hold” , and this can also be attributed to

Penelope’s unravelling of the shroud (the grid) she is weaving in the epic poem, The

Odyssey.

40Both artists are engaged in the art of undoing.

Homer’s Penelope however is engaged in what could amount to a modern-day, feminist

pause. Her unravelling is enacting a status quo, where she bides her time before

deciding on whom she would marry now that her husband is deemed lost.

“Three whole

years she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme” before they caught her in the

act unravelling her “gorgeous web”.41 Penelope was using the everyday task of weaving

37 Emily Hauser, Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It, (London:

Penguin Books, 2025), ??

38 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,”875.

39 Homer, The Odyssey, 2.98-100.

40 Peter Shand, “If I were Penelope,” Art New Zealand, no. 90 (Autumn 1999): 61.

41 Homer, The Odyssey, 2.100-104.

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to resist her suitors, symbolic of the patriarchal system she finds herself in. Her

unraveling was a silent protest, transforming the labour of weaving into rebellion and we

can now imagine her voice through deconstructive narratives.

The tone of the language used is remarkable - descriptions of unwanted seduction,

deceit, and entanglement. Unsurprisingly, there are many feminist rewritings of the

stories of Homer’s women on the bookshelves currently, giving voice to the women that

have been overlooked, misrepresented or marginalized. I have taken references from

Claire North’s trilogy, The Last Song of Penelope (2024), Emily Hauser’s Mythica (2025),

and Carol Ann DuIy’s collection of poetry, The World’s Wife (1999):

“I wore a widow’s face, kept my head down,

did my work by day, at night unpicked it.

….

I was picking out

the smile of a woman at the centre

of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content,

most certainly not waiting,

When I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside

the door.”

(31-44)42

I reference the line “Most certainly not waiting” (see fig.29) by stitching the words into

fabric with light grey thread to emulate the ‘white ink’ that Cixous wrote about. In my

hanging fabric works, I focus on three women in mythology who use weaving to

communicate their narrative: Penelope, Philomela, and Arachne. The hanging

installation on drying racks bringing the domestic and the everyday into the equation

and presents a hanging portrait silhouette, like those first wall hung tapestries.

Figure 29. Karen Covic, Details, Most Certainly Not Waiting, 2025.

42 Carol Ann DuGy,

“Penelope”

, in The World’s Wife (London: Macmillan, 1999), 23.

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In the story of Philomela, the tapestry she wove while imprisoned and sent to her sister,

told of the trauma she had experienced in the only way left to her, as words were not

forthcoming without a tongue. Her act of making told of her undoing, and how she had

been silenced. It was a protest and call to action, an early #MeToo. Feminine expression

transformed from passive to active. Weaving had become a valuable and available tool

for a new form of expression. Painting as a first-person statement.44 This is taken from

my Notes on (How to Make a) Painting:

Needle, pin, PRICK, tongue gone, Philomela. Though Philomela lost her love [!!], fresh

note she warbleth yes again, fa la la la la.45 We must tell our stories, speak up, weave

ourselves back into history. White thread, white ink, écriture féminine46

, invisible until

discovered. [UV]. Jug, Jug, Tereu.47 WE MUST TAKE UP SPACE.

(33-33)48

Figure 30. Karen Covic, detail from Philomela, 2025.

Like Rosler and Ukeles, both Penelope and Philomela were using what was to hand, the

everyday, to make their protest. Arachne is transformed by Athena after a weaving

44 Earnest, interview with Judy Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, 338.

45 Thomas Morely, Canzonets to Three Voices (London:1593), no. 23, “Though Philomela Lost Her Love”

46 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 1975.

47 T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Horace Liveright, 1922), 32-33.

48 Karen Covic, “Notes on (How to make a) Painting,” 2025.

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contest goes wrong. She redefines the action of weaving, as a spider, it is now as an act

of survival.

The hubris of Arachne, imagine! She weaved a superior scene of inferior scenes. Got

caught up in her own web. An old woman appears = MAMAN.

49 Art as defiance,

exposure, revelation. Condemned to weave forever, join the club, mutters Sisyphus. Art

as physical labour. Process but no product. It’s a thankless task.

(44-47)51

Louise Bourgeois created the sculpture, Maman, in 1999 (see fig.31) as an ode to her

mother who was a tapestry restorer. The huge bronze spider represents her mother’s

care, protection and skill as she presided over her family. Perhaps it is a feminist

reclaiming of the image of the spider, from Arachne’s condemnation, to weaving

comfort and security (see fig.32).

Figure 31. Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999.

49 Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999.

51 Covic, “Notes on (How to make a) Painting,” 2025.

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Figure 32. Louise Bourgeois,

Spider (Cell), 1997.

Figure 33. Karen Covic,

Arachne (detail), 2025.

THE RECLAIMING:

Rozsika Parkers’s influential book, The Subversive Stitch, published in 1984, presented a

feminist art-history account of how embroidery, the artform of the domestic (women’s

work) and the feminine ideal (ocering moral and behavioural instruction), became a

rebellious platform for subversive art makers. In the 1970s, women artists reclaimed

embroidery and needlework as a ‘political tool’ , the cross-stitch grid firing oI feminist

tropes. In my own work, I took inspiration from a line in Carol Ann DuIy’s, “Thetis”

, (I

shrunk myself, to the size of a bird in the hand, of a man.) (see fig.37).

52 Also, a line from

Joni Mitchell’s song “River” from the album Blue (see fig.38).

52 Carol Ann Duay, “Thetis”, in The World’s Wife, 5.

53 Joni Mitchell, “River”, Blue, Reprise Records, 1971, track 8, streaming on Spotify.

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Figure 34. Mary Ann Body, sampler, 1789. Figure 35. Tracey Emin,

This is a joke, 2009.

Figure 36. Hannah Hill,

Feminist Arthur Meme, 2016.

Figure 37. Karen Covic,

To fit in the palm of your hand, 2025.

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Figure 38. Karen Covic, I wish I had a River, 2025.

In 1980s, Egyptian born, French artist Ghada Amer was forced to find her own artistic

language with which to speak about women as a woman, after being refused entry to

painting classes that were reserved only for men. This motivated her to create her

signature ‘embroidery paintings’ by using needlework divisively by “penetrating the male

domain of the painted canvas” .

54 Her desire was to give a voice back to silenced

women, moving them from “passive object to an active subject”.55 She activated the

female subject by initially using images of women engaged in domestic tasks. Amer’s

Cinque Femme Au Travail interestingly includes four women engaged in domestic tasks

and the artist makes up the fifth invisible women working (see fig. 39-42). She then

moves on to sourcing pornographic images to reclaim representations of female

sexuality (see fig.43&44). This was seen by prominent feminists such as Cixous as being

the only way to end linguistic repression. Jouissance, (sexual pleasure) was identified by

54 Laura Reily, Writing the Body: Ghada Amer, (Auckland: Ghada Amer Books, 2023), 8.

55 Riley, Writing the Body, 10.

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her French feminist contemporaries, as the only suitable rebuttal to Freud’s silencing

assertion that “woman wants nothing” .

Figure 39. Ghada Amer,

Cinq Femmes Au Travail,

Cooking, 1991.

Figure 40. Ghada Amer,

Cinq Femmes Au Travail,

Grocery Shopping, 1991.

Figure 41. Ghada Amer,

Cinq Femmes Au Travail,

Nurturing, 1991.

Figure 42. Ghada Amer,

Cinq Femmes Au Travail,

Vacuuming, 1991.

56 Riley, Writing the Body, 9.

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Figure 43. Ghada Amer, La Première,1992.

Figure 44. Ghada Amer, La Ligne Horizontale,1994.

But what of Penelope Judy Millar? In discussion with Jarrett Earnest in 2023, she

describes every painting as a proposition. Influenced by many readings of The Shape of

Time by George Kübler, she enjoys the concept of Kübler’s non-linear take on art history,

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in which painting is not a sequence of stylistic periods but becomes a chain of problem-

solving responses, which inspire or provoke.57 We come full circle to Penelope’s

problem-solving shroud-unravelling, Philomela’s provoking storytelling in thread, and

Arachne’s provocation of the gods.

paintings come out of paintings, come out of paintings. And whether they’re coming out

of your own previous paintings or whether they’re coming out of paintings you know

about, or have seen or experienced, they belong to themselves before they belong to the

painter58

Myths provide an assortment of narrative strands that can be formed, deconstructed

and remade, and in each retelling, they receive added reference. To retell is to

metamorphose, and perhaps it is with each retelling that the myth is “reinscribed,

”

rather than “rubbed out,

” each reference a layering and a reinforcement.

59 Myths are

stories of mistakes and in referencing them, we introduce the fissures in which we

glimpse the everyday and recognise ourselves.

THE REDEFINING:

No one shows their mistakes anymore, the development of their thinking across the

page. Everything appears in the world as unconditional and without doubt: no waver

here, no lapse of concentration there: no fissure in which to peer through and see the

humanity inside.60

Tacita Dean was writing about Cy Twombly’s exhibition Cycles and Seasons in 2008,

when she put forward this notion of revealing artistic development by showing workings

and mistakes (see fig.45&46). She is looking for fissures in which to glimpse a humanity

where we are less able to hide our mistakes, and the gaps to notice the presence of the

artist. Her filmmaking work often focuses on the poetics of time and decay; she made

several films about well-known artists in the last phase of their lives. Cy Twombly died

shortly after her short documentary film Edwin Parker in 2011. We glimpse humanity in

these moments of decay as decay is a form of undoing. Dean likes to showcase the

vulnerability of decay but in a life aIirming way.

57 Earnest, interview with Judy Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, 331.

58 Earnest, interview with Judy Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, 338.

59 Siemon Allen, “Destruction/Construction,” in Julie Mehretu: City Sittings exh.cat (Detroit: Detroit

Institute of Arts, 2007), 51.

60 Dean, “A Panegyric,”, 35.

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Figure 45. Cy Twombly, Apollo, 1975. Figure 46 Cy Twombly, Poems to the Sea, 1959.

In the introduction to her book, The Story of Art Without Men, Katy Hessel wrote of how

she conducted her own YouGov survey in the UK in 2022 and found that 83% of 18- to

24-year-olds could not name three women artists. This was in response to some

sobering statistics from the United States:

In the collections of eighteen major US art museums, 87 percent of artworks were by

men, and 85 percent by white artists. Currently women artists make up just 1

percent of London’s National Gallery collection. This same museum only staged

their first solo exhibition by a historic female artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, in 2020.63

There may be more practising women artists, but they are still under-represented by

the education system and major institutions.64 The arguments put forward in Linda

Nochlin’s 1971 essay, “Why have there been no great women artists?” remain

relevant and true in 2025. There are still institutional and social barriers for women

artists today, although there are many female art students, as when Nochlin wrote

her essay, but what is encouraging is that more women are writing about women and

bringing them into art discourse.

63 Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022),10.

64 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Woman in Sexist Society:

Studies in Power and Powerlessness. Ed., Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran. (New York: Basic

Books, 1971).

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However, Nochlin also argued that perhaps we need to rethink those histories and

question how we assess what art is, and who makes it. We need a more flexible set

of criteria when looking back and to search a little harder to find the women on the

sidelines, for they are there, just written in white ink and hidden behind a pile of dirty

washing.

The discourse surrounding art and labour has created opportunities for female

artists to showcase forms of making traditionally defined as women’s work, as well

as art that operates in the everyday. Traditionally feminine crafts such as

embroidery and needlecraft have transitioned from passive, controlled activities to

politically activated tools of expression and the labour and technical skill involved

has been recognised and is now celebrated.

Everyday domestic chores, showcased as performance art in the1970s, by artists

such as Rosler and Ukeles, broke down barriers of what we think of as art and

challenged how we recognise and define art workers. Artmaking shifted from being

the exclusive domain of the male “artistic genius” to a more accessible, working-

class pursuit, and as a result the practices and experiences of women, especially

those rooted in domestic labour, found greater resonance within the art world.

In turn, this made way for women artists to be recognised and spoken about in the

art discourse, however, many female artists still struggle with the juggle of artmaker

and homemaker. There are numerous examples of women who decide to forego one

or the other, Florence Welsh and the pursuit of her musical career, and Anne

McCahon and her decision to support her husband’s career, for example.

Women today are speaking and writing about women — in art, literature, and music — on

their own terms, without the need to define themselves in relation to men, except when

they have stood in the way. Hélène Cixous’s call for women to write themselves back

into history has not only begun but continues with growing enthusiasm. The sheer

number of books written by female authors recovering lost female narratives, both in

literature and in art history, testifies to this movement. Each new retelling of women’s

experiences builds upon the last, layering perspectives and widening the narrative to

include voices, cultures, and philosophies long excluded from dominant mythologies

and Western traditions. The narrative written on manuscripts of previous narratives, the

narrative structure is palimpsest. Women writing about women.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Karen Covic, Shroud, 2024, ink, acrylic, Mull fabric and pastel on canvas, 600

x 420mm.

2. Julie Mehretu, Empirical Construction, Istanbul, 2003, acrylic and ink on

canvas, 3048 x 4572mm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

3. 4. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/91778

Julie Mehretu, Stadia, 2004, acrylic and ink on canvas, 2718 x 3556mm,

Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/julie-

mehretu-stadia-i

Julie Mehretu, Berliner Plätz, 2008-9, acrylic and ink on canvas, 3048 x

4267mm, Deutsche Bank AG, Berlin. https://www.artchive.com/artwork/berliner-

plaetze-julie-mehretu/

5. Piet Mondrian, Composition II, with red and blue, 1929, oil on canvas, 403 x

321mm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816

6. Marlow Moss, White and Yellow, 1935, oil paint, string and canvas on canvas,

622 x 400 mm, Tate Britian, London.

7. 8. 9. Karen Covic, Tapis, 2024, acrylic, ink, Mull fabric and pastel on unprimed

canvas, 1200 x 800mm.

Karen Covic, Untitled, 2024, acrylic, ink, Mull fabric and pastel on unprimed

canvas, 1000 x 800mm

Karen Covic, Penelope, 2025, thread, dye, and felt tip on unprimed canvas,

2000 x 1200mm.

10. Unknown maker in Flemish workshop, Detail of Ulysses and Circe from The

Story of Ulysses, tapestry wool and silk, c. 1550-65, 5000 x 3500mm, National

Trust, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, UK, in Helen Wyld, The Art of Tapestry.

(London, UK: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023), 38.

11. Unknown maker in Flemish workshop, Detail from Oudenaarde tapestry,

c.1580-1600, tapestry wool and silk, dimensions unknown, MOU Museum

Oudenaarde in Belgium, in Helen Wyld, The Art of Tapestry. (London, UK: Philp

Wilson Publishers, 2023), 15.

12. Unknown maker in Flemish workshop, Detail from Oudenaarde tapestry,

c.1580-1600, tapestry wool and silk, dimensions unknown, MOU Museum

Oudenaarde in Belgium, in Helen Wyld, The Art of Tapestry. (London, UK: Philip

Wilson Publishers, 2023), 15.

13. Andy Warhol, Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 508 x

406mm (each, 32 canvases total), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79809

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14. Hollis Frampton, untiled from The Secret World of Frank Stella, 1958-62,

black and white photograph, 203 x 254m, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis,

Minnesota. https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/untitled-from-the-

secret-world-of-frank-stella

15. Chris Burden, Honest Labour, 1979, performance, documented by unknown

photographer in Vancouver, BC.

https://www.tumblr.com/i12bent/4525696390/chris-burden-honest-labor-

1979-vancouver-bc.

16. Karen Covic, work in progress shots, tablecloths, 2025, ink, dye and spray-

paint on canvas, dimension unknown.

17. Mierle Laderman Ukelels, still from Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, Outside,

1973, performance held at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 12

gelatin silver prints resin coated, 406 x 508mm, accessed October 31, 2025, Art

Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/218715/washing-tracks-

maintenance-outside

18. Mierle Laderman Ukelels, still from Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, Outside,

1973, performance held at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 12

gelatin silver prints resin coated, 406 x 508mm, accessed October 31, 2025, Art

Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/218715/washing-tracks-

maintenance-outside

19. Martha Rosler, Backyard Economy I and Backyard Economy II (Diane Germain

Mowing), 1974, Super 8mm film transferred to video (colour, silent), 14:50,

Museum of Modern Art, New York,

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/159786

20. Martha Rosler, Backyard Economy I and Backyard Economy II (Diane Germain

Mowing), 1974, Super 8mm film transferred to video (colour, silent), 14:50,

Museum of Modern Art, New York,

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/159786

21. Karen Covic, Installation mock up, 2025, fabric hangings, dimensions

variable.

22. Karen Covic, Installation mock up, with washing, 2025, fabric and clothes

hangings, dimensions variable.

23. Ann Hamilton, indigo blue, 1991/2007, installation, cotton clothing, wood and

steel platform, wood table and stool, book, and eraser, dimensions variable, San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, accessed October 31, 2025,

https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2007.99.A-D/

24. Ann Hamilton, indigo blue, 1991/2007, installation, cotton clothing, wood and

steel platform, wood table and stool, book, and eraser, dimensions variable, San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, accessed October 31, 2025,

https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2007.99.A-D/

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25. Judy Millar, Swallowed in Space, 2017, acrylic and oil on canvas, dimension

unknown, exhibited in Swallowed in Space, Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich,

Switzerland, October 27–December 23, 2017, https://judymillar.com/swallowed-

in-space/

26. Anoushka Akel, Wet Physics, 2021, oil, pastel and wax pencil on canvas, 1000 x

1500mm, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland,

https://michaellett.com/artist/anoushka-akel/

27. Anoushka Akel, Carrying the Beast (lignin), 2024, Oil and oil pastel on canvas,

450 x 600mm, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland,

https://michaellett.com/artist/anoushka-akel/

28. Anoushka Akel, Commune, 2024, Oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 1500 x

3000mm (triptych, each panel 1500 x 1000mm), Michael Lett Gallery,

Auckland, https://michaellett.com/artist/anoushka-akel/

29. Karen Covic, Most Certainly Not Waiting (details), 2025, thread on

polyester/silk mix, dimensions variable.

30. Karen Covic, Philomela (detail), 2025, thread, spray-paint, felt tip on polyester,

dimensions variable.

31. Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999 (cast 2001), bronze, marble, and stainless steel,

88,392 mm x 97,536 mm x 11,5824 mm, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/10856

Louise Bourgeois, Spider (Cell), 1997, steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber,

silver, gold, and bone, 4496 x 6655 x 5182mm, The Easton Foundation, New

York. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/42/684

32. Karen Covic, Arachne (detail), 2025, thread, spray-paint on polyester fabric,

dimensions unknown.

33. Mary Ann Body, sampler, 1789, hand embroidered with silk, dimensions

unknown, Victoria and Albert Museum, London,

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70384/sampler-body-mary-ann/

34. Tracey Emin, Is this a Joke, 2009, mixed media, embroidered blanket, 2240 x

2000mm, private collection,

https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/18632/Tracey-Emin-Is-This-a-

Joke?lang=en

35. Hannah Hill, Feminist Arther Meme, 2016, hand embroidery on calico, 80 x

80mm, privately owned, https://www.hanecdote.co.uk/hanecdote-

work/feminist-arthur-meme-2016

36. Karen Covic, To Fit in the Palm of Your Hand (detail), 2025, thread on canvas,

dimensions unknown.

37. Karen Covic, I Wish I Had a River, 2025, ink and thread on polyester, 700 x

550mm.

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38. Ghada Amer, Cinq Femmes au Travail, Cooking, 1991, embroidery on canvas,

550 x 630mm, private collection. https://ghadaamer.com/paintings/

39. Ghada Amer, Cinq Femmes au Travail, Grocery Shopping, 1991, embroidery

on canvas, 550 x 630mm, private collection.

https://ghadaamer.com/paintings/

40. Ghada Amer, Cinq Femmes au Travail, Nuturing, 1991, embroidery on canvas,

550 x 630mm, private collection. https://ghadaamer.com/paintings/

41. Ghada Amer, Cinq Femmes au Travail, Vacuuming, 1991, embroidery on

canvas, 550 x 630mm, private Collection. https://ghadaamer.com/paintings/

42. Ghada Amer, La Premiere, 1992, embroidery on canvas, private Collection.

https://ghadaamer.com/paintings/

43. Ghada Amer, La Ligne Horizontale, 1994, embroidery on canvas, private

collection. https://ghadaamer.com/paintings/

44. Cy Twombly, Apollo, 1975, Oil stick, graphite, and oil paint on paper, 1500 ×

1332mm, Collection of the Cy Twombly Foundation,

https://artblart.com/2017/04/11/exhibition-cy-twombly-at-the-centre-

pompidou-paris/twombly-apollo-web/.

45. Cy Twombly, Poems to the Sea (one of 24 drawings), 1959, Oil-based house

paint, pencil, wax crayon, and colored pencil on paper, 310 x 303mm, Dia

Foundation, New York, https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-13-summer-

2008/lingering-threshold-between-word-and-image

Karen Covic MFA

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Albers, Anni. On Weaving: New Expanded Edition. With afterword by Nicholas

Fox Weber and contributions by Manuel Cirauqui & T’ai Smith. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2017.

• Cahill, James. Flying Too Close to the Sun: Myths in Art from Classical to

Contemporary. London: Phaidon Press, 2018.

• Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and

Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (Summer

1976): 875–893.

• Duffy, Carol Ann. The World’s Wife: Poems. London: Picador, 2000.

• Frame, Janet. Owls Do Cry. Christchurch, NZ: Pegasus Press, 1957.

• Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Art and Literature, no. 4 (Spring

1965): 193-201.

• Graw, Isabelle, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in

the Post-Medium Condition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

• Hauser, Emily. Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women

Written Out of It. London: Penguin Books, 2025.

• Henderson, P. L. Unravelling Women’s Art. Supernova Books, 2021.

• Hessel, Katy. The Story of Art Without Men. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,

2023.

• Ingram, Simon, Gregory Minissale, Caroline Vercoe, and Victoria Wynne-Jones,

eds. The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics. Kerber Verlag, 2022.

• Joselit, David. “Reassembling Painting.” In Painting 2.0: Expression in the

Information Age, Gesture and Spectacle, Eccentric Figuration, Social Networks,

edited by Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit, 169-181. New

York and London: Prestel Publishing/DelMonico Books, 2016.

• Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (Spring 1979): 50–

64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778321.

• Michael Lett. Documents. 1st ed. Auckland, AUK, New Zealand: Michael Lett,

2023.

• Molesworth, Helen et al.

“Work Ethic.

” In Work Ethic, edited by Helen

Molesworth, Darsie Alexander, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, 25-52. University Park,

PA: Pennsylvania State University Press in co-publication with the Baltimore

Museum of Art, 2003.

• Morton, Frances. “The Power of Two: The Woman Behind Colin McCahon.”

Metro, November 2016.

• Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Woman in

Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick

and Barbara K. Moran, 145-178. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

• North, Claire. The Last Song of Penelope. New York: Redhook, 2024.

• Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the

Feminine. London: I.B.Tauris, 1984.

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• Reilly, Maura, and Ghada Amer. Ghada Amer. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co.,

2010.

• Schouela, Jessica. “Marlow Moss: Transgender and The Double Line.” Women’s

Art Journal 39, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2018): 34-42.

• Serota, Nicholas, Nicholas Cullinan, Tacita Dean, Richard Shiff, and Cy

Twombly. “Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons.” Choice Reviews Online 46, no. 07

(March 1, 2009): 46–3644. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-3644.

• Shand, Peter. “If I Were Penelope.” Art New Zealand No. 82 (Autumn 1997): 62-

65.

• Steinberg, Leo. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-century Art. New

edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

• Wyld, Helen. The Art of Tapestry. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023.

• Wynne-Jones, Victoria. “Carrying the Beast.” In Anoushka Akel: Carrying the

Beast, exhibition catalogue, 11 September – 26 October 2024, Auckland:

Michael Lett, 2024.

• Wynne-Jones, Victoria, Sriwhana Spong, Rosemary Overell, Selina Ershadi, Lisa

Samuels, Robyn Pickens, Balamohan Shingade, et al. Michael Lett Documents:

2021–2023. Auckland: Michael Lett, 2023.

AssignmentsKaren CovicNovember 5, 2025