Helen Beard

'I knew that I wanted to make a painting with a clitoris shape. Nobody knew it was that shape until really recently, I just couldn’t believe that we wouldn’t know that. I guess doctors didn’t study female anatomy, it was unimportant in a patriarchal system. It’s a lovely shape and it’s really graphic, and the minute I saw it, it made me think of those Matisse works. I wanted to make each one slightly different because all women are different. So they couldn’t be the same but I wanted to keep them as simple shapes, like Matisse’s cut outs and I did do them as cut outs to start with. The titles of my works are really important and I was making an awful lot of paintings, so it felt factory-like, and I was thinking about Warhol and The Factory and listening to that Gang of Four song 'It's Her Factory' and then it just sort of seemed really relevant. It was significant that it was my factory, that it’s a woman’s'
Helen Beard 2021