Raging: Revisiting Raging Dyke Network

My contribution takes an existing work in which the vernacular postcard leads to alternative voices that reveal landscape’s latent histories. From the accompanying exhibition Practising Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation, Raging Dyke Network (2012) is the specific artwork under discussion here. It is a multi-view postcard series that represents the scale of a network active in the 1990s, without revealing personal and political content that belonged to a group of women who identified themselves in terms of their separatist gender politics. Raging Dyke Network was commissioned by the Glasgow Women’s Library for its ‘Two Decades and 21 Revolutions’ exhibition and publication project, in which 21 women artists and 21 women writers were invited to create new work inspired by items and artefacts in the Glasgow Women’s Library collection. In 2012, my close collaboration with one of the Library’s volunteers, Alice Andrews, was crucial to realizing this work. This collaboration was in response to the conditions set by the Raging Dyke Network activist who donated materials – including personal letters and zines – to the Glasgow Women’s Library and the Lesbian Archive in 2000. The donor made explicit who could have direct access to these materials, and who could not. I fell into the latter category, and my collaboration with Alice became more than an important means of mediation with materials. This collaboration navigated with the aesthetics, ethics and exclusions that were attached to the RDN artefacts and then to the artwork itself. The broad reach of the Network, as relayed to me by Alice, led to the idea that a postcard of a place could ‘stand-in’ for each Raging Dyke, whether she was from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland or Washington D.C, USA. For the symposium, I will revisit the landscape imagery in the original vernacular postcard. I want to reflect on the significance of the passage of time for this particular work. The cultural landscape of LGBTQ and accompanying discourses have evolved significantly since 2012. I will reflect on some informal yet key observations subsequently made by Alice, alongside others who have reflected on subsequent shifts and the role artists play in articulating ethical challenges when alternative voices reveal difficult and even alienating past histories.