Osborne & What presents ‘This Is What The Menopause Looks Like’.
Opens 11th May 2022 11-6pm daily.
Launch Event Friday 13th May 2022:
7pm kick off
Free lemon and ginger herbal tea and cake
Bar …music, dancing
Spoken word by Helen Shepphard and Kat Lyons
Catrin Osborne is an artist based in Ramsgate in Kent. She Studied my MA in Performance Design and Practise at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London ten years ago.
After going through a difficult menopause she travelled the UK in 2019, meeting, photographing and interviewing women going through menopause. The aims were to lessen the stigma around the menopause, begin a conversation with women going through it to encourage and support each other, and celebrate women of all ages, going through this transition.
This culminated in a small exhibition at Chats Palace in Hackney in 2019.
Reviews of the Hackney show said: “The invisible made visible. As a menopausal woman viewer it brought great pleasure to have a sense of community, simply to stand in the presence of ‘women of a certain age’, photographed as they are. Not forgetting the joy of nosiness and comparison of experience. Against a background of cultural disappearance of middle aged women Catrin has begun to catalogue the loss / advertise the presence.” Billy Chan.
“This exhibition reveals the diversity of experience of menopause, and also celebrates the lived experience of a wide range of women. It is very uplifting, and also empowering to share an open conversation about a topic which, historically, has been associated with shame and secrecy.
Together we are stronger.” Maria Gandy.
Catrin is now taking the exhibition on tour (funded by The Arts Council). There will be photographs and interviews of around 70 women on show in May 2022.
There will also be an extract of a show, about menopause, performed by a Bristol based writer and spoken word artist Kat Lyons.
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Photos below of Kat, Alison and Gemma.
