Free Thinking

Latest Episodes:

Partition, colonial power and the voices of C16th women Mar 14, 2019

Show notes

Artist Hew Locke and historians Suzannah Lipscomb, Aanchal Malhotra & Anindya Raychaudhuri talk to Rana Mitter about using objects and archives to create new images of the past, from Guyana to India and Pakistan to women in C16th France.

Suzannah Lipscomb's book The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc uses the evidence of 1,200 cases brought before the consistories – or moral courts – of the Huguenot church of Languedoc between 1561 and 1615 to summon up the lives of ordinary women.

Hew Locke Here's The Thing - the most comprehensive show of his art in the UK runs at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham from March 8th to 2nd June 2019 and then tours to Kansas City and Maine.

Aanchal Malhotra is the author of Remnants of Partition : 21 Objects from a Continent Divided. She is also the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory Anindya Raychaudhuri teaches at the University of St Andrews and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. He has published Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora. You can hear his Essay on Partitioned Memories for BBC Radio 3 here https://bbc.in/2SJjLew

Producer: Luke Mulhall

The Council Estate in Culture Mar 13, 2019

Show notes

Painter George Shaw, crime writer Dreda Say Mitchell and drama expert Katie Beswick join Matthew Sweet to look at depictions of estate living - from the writing of Andrea Dunbar to SLICK on Sheffield's Park Hill estate to the images of the Tile Hill estate in Coventry where George Shaw grew up, which he creates using Humbrol enamel - the kind of paint used for Airfix kits. Plus a view of the French banlieue from artist Kader Attia.

George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field is at the Holburne Museum, Bath to 6th May 2019. Katie Beswick has just published Social Housing in Performance. Dreda Say Mitchell's latest book is called Spare Room. She also writes the Flesh and Blood Series set in London's gangland and the Gangland Girls series. Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion runs at the Hayward Gallery at London's SouthBank Centre to May 6th 2019.

Is British Culture Getting Wierder? Mar 12, 2019

Show notes

Gazelle Twin (Elizabeth Bernholz), Julia Bardsley, Hannah Catherine Jones, Luke Turner & William Fowler join Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and an audience at Café OTO at the Late Junction Festival for a debate about trends within British culture.

Gazelle Twin (Elizabeth Bernholz) is a British composer, producer and musician Julia Bardsley,is a performer and lecturer Hannah Catherine Jones is a multi-instrumentalist and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra Luke Turner is co-founder and editor of arts magazine The Quietus and author of a memoir Out of the Woods. William Fowler is Curator of Artists' Moving Image at the BFI National Archive. BFI's Derek Jarman's Blu-ray box set available 18th March 2019. https://bit.ly/2VRl5hg

You might also be interested in Enchantment Witches and Woodland https://bbc.in/2C2fQnK Encyclopedias and Knowledge - includes a discussion about Mark Fisher K Punk https://bbc.in/2UO8V8n Into the Eerie - an episode of Radio 3's Sunday Feature https://bbc.in/2EM26PF Charms - authors Zoe Gilbert, Madeline Miller and Kirsty Logan https://bbc.in/2FZfflG

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Women, relationships and the law past and present Mar 07, 2019

Show notes

Lying about a sexual attack, resisting parental pressures to marry, using the law to fight for inheritance and divorce. Shahidha Bari talks to the fiction writers Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Layla AlAmmar about their new books which depict girls who feel they need to conceal truths about sexual encounters. Historian Jennifer Aston looks at examples of nineteenth century British women fighting for divorce. Jessica Malay researches the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676)

The Pact We Made by Layla AlAmmar and Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen are out now. Jennifer Aston from the University of Northumbria is researching divorce and domestic violence in England and Wales, c.1857-1923. Jessica Malay from the University of Huddersfield is responsible for the first print edition of Lady Anne Clifford's Great Books of Record. She is also the author of a book on a 17th century woman who wrote of her troubled marriage, which includes harrowing experiences of domestic abuse who went through two court cases pursuing a separation from her husband. The book is the Case of Mistress Mary Hampson.

Lakeland Arts is re-uniting a portrait of Lady Anne Clifford loaned by the National Portrait Gallery with an image of her mother Lady Margaret Russell at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Cumbria from 22 March - 22 June 2019.

From our archives: New Research into the Women's Suffrage Movement https://bbc.in/2tLwvr2 Women's Voices in the Classical World https://bbc.in/2EMjC6y Neglected Women: Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Robinson https://bbc.in/2VwTh1D Rewriting C20th British Philosophy https://bbc.in/2ErYT9P Discrimination https://bbc.in/2pQKMko Deborah Frances White and Women Finding a Voice https://bbc.in/2NDf9Io

Producer: Robyn Read

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing Mar 06, 2019

Show notes

How self-revealing and frank should a writer be? Lara Feigel, David Aaronovitch, Melissa Benn and Xiaolu Guo join Matthew Sweet to look at the life of Doris Lessing and her 1962 novel in which she explores difficult love, life, war, politics and dreams.

Inspired by her re-reading of Doris Lessing, Lara Feigel has written a revealing book which is part memoir part biography called "Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing". It is out in paperback. Melissa Benn's books include Mother and Child, One of Us and School Wars David Aaronovitch is the author of Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists and a former winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism. Xiaolu Guo has written a memoir Once Upon a Time in the East, and novels including UFO in Her Eyes, and Lovers In the Age of Indifference.

Producer: Fiona McLean

David Bailey, Don McCullin Mar 05, 2019

Show notes

The photographers, David Bailey and Don McCullin, came to prominence in the 1960s but their pictures did more than define a decade. Don McCullin's work in Vietnam, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and the Middle East have come to epitomise what we mean by war photography and David Bailey's portraits of Jean Shrimpton, Mick Jagger and Catherine Deneuve established a new idiom for glamour. Yet fame has tended to obscure the full range of both men's work. Bailey, for example, has produced a huge volume of images conjuring up a spectral London as well as his portraits while McCulllin has infused the Somerset levels where he now lives with a haunted beauty. As Philip Dodd discovered when he visited David Bailey in his studio and caught up with Don McCullin on the eve of his Tate show both men have vivid memories of the Blitz and were transformed by their experience of National Service.

Don McCullin is on show at Tate Britain until May 6th 2019. David Bailey: The Sixties is on show at Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street in London until March 30th.

Producer: Zahid Warley

The joy of sewing, poet Fatimah Asghar, Painting in miniature. Mar 04, 2019

Show notes

Shahidha Bari talks to Fatimah Asghar about poetry and the Emmy nominated web series Brown Girls. We have a look at the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver – court painters to Queen Elizabeth and James the first who both feature in an exhibition which invites visitors to pick up a magnifying glass to inspect every detail of their jewel-like images. Plus the popular history of sewing with Clare Hunter. She is also joined by historians Christina Faraday, who studies art in Tudor and Jacobean England and Jade Halbert, who researches the British Fashion Industry.

Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver runs at the National Portait Gallery in London from February 21st to May 19th 2019. Clare Hunter has written Threads of Life The Great British Sewing Bee is on air on BBC Two. Fatimah Asghar's poetry collection is called If They Come For Us.

Skeuomorphs, Design and Modern Craft Feb 28, 2019

Show notes

Laurence Scott, Will Self and New Generation Thinkers Lisa Mullen and Danielle Thom look at redundant features in design plus a visit to Collect: International Art Fair for Modern Craft and Design, presented at the Crafts Council, at the Saatchi Gallery in London. And, we discuss the 19th century French novelist Karl-Joris Huysmans as art critic, with Huysmans scholar and translator Brendan King.

Collect, The International Art Fair for Contemporary Objects is on at the Saatchi Gallery in London from 28 February - 3 March 2019 Danielle Thom is a curator at the Museum of London. Lisa Mullen is the author of Mid-century Gothic: The uncanny objects of modernity in British literature and culture after the Second World War

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Jack the Ripper and women as victims Feb 26, 2019

Show notes

Historian Hallie Rubenhold reveals the previously untold stories of the five women killed by the Ripper and challenges the myths that have grown up around the Whitechapel Murders of 1888.

Images of Japan Feb 21, 2019

Show notes

Fumio Obata and Jocelyne Allen discuss graphic art and manga.

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