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Artworks
Jo Spence
Only when I got to fifty did I realise I was Cinderella (05), 1984Artist laminated exhibition panel32.5 x 32.5 cms 12 12/16 x 12 12/16 insSeries: 3. Fairy Tales and Photography... or, Another Look at Cinderella (1981-84)11979Provenance
Jo Spence Memorial Archive
Richard Saltoun Gallery, LondonExhibitions
Jo Spence: Review of Work 1950-1985, Camerawork Gallery, London, 1985. Exhibition toured by Cockpit Gallery:
Dales Brewery, March - April, 1985,
Ffotogallery, Cardiff, July 1985
Battersea Arts Centre, Sept 1985
Triangle Gallery, Birmingham, October 1985
The Cockpit Gallery, Holborn, London, January 1986
Phototherapy Road Show, Photographers' Gallery, 1985
Missing Persons / Damaged Lives. Jo Spence in collaboration with Rosy Martin, Ya'acov Khan, David Roberts and Tim Sheard, Leeds City Art Galleries, 1991.
Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead: Techniques of Becoming'at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 16 October 2021 - 2 January 2022
Jo Spence : from Fairy Tales to Phototherapy. Photographs from the Hyman Collection, Arnolfini Bristol, (18th May 2020 - 20th June 2021) (this print)
'Jo Spence. Fairytales and Photography' at the Centre for British Photography (26 January - 28 May 2023)
Jo Spence: A Woman’s Place? at Belfast Exposed in Collaboration with the Centre for British Photography. 7th October 2024 – 21st December 2024
Literature
Jo Spence, Putting myself in the picture: A political, personal, and photographic autobiography, 1986, p.99 (photograph reproduced without accompanying inscription, captioned "Family album as fairystory")One of a set of rare artist-laminated exhibition panels that Jo Spence made in collaboration with Rosy Martin and Terry Dennett. The colour works from this series were made in...One of a set of rare artist-laminated exhibition panels that Jo Spence made in collaboration with Rosy Martin and Terry Dennett. The colour works from this series were made in collaboration with Rosy Martin and the black and white work in collaboration with Terry Dennett.
Rosy Martin has written of this series of laminated panels: "The individual photos did have their own titles. Jo is using work made in photo-therapy sessions with me in another context - to tell another set of stories."
Inscribed:
"Only when I got to fifty did I realise I was Cinderella.
Why couldn't I speak before?
Why did I have to go into therapy?"
A variant of this image (without the bucket and in a very slightly different pose) is also included in Jo Spence's unpublished thesis: Jo Spence, 'Fairy Tales and Photography... or, another look at Cinderella', undergraduate thesis, Polytechnic of Central London, 1982. Spence captions it Traditional "documentary" treatment of housework within photography...
These laminated panels, from 1984, build from this engagement with Cinderella and also look forward to the centrality of health issues in her later work.
In the image itself is also reproduced in Jo Spence, Putting myself in the picture: A political, personal, and photographic autobiography, 1986, p.128. There it is in the section "Fairy Tales and Photography 1980", suggesting that Spence reused this earlier image, from 1980, when she made the laminated panels. This published context also emphasises its appropriation within Spence's exploration of Cinderella and fairy tales.
We are grateful to Rosy Martin for her assistance in cataloguing this work.
