Two feminist performances at and against the statue of John Bright, Rochdale, England

This chapter discusses two artistic interventions on and against the statue of mill owner and politician John Bright: the performance and photo essay ‘Monument to Working Women’, by Shirley Cameron, Monica Ross, and Evelyn Silver, part of the residency Triple Transformations, Rochdale Art Gallery, 1985; and Gut Feelings Meri Jaan, 2021, by Jasleen Kaur and project collaborators, consisting of three films and a book. These art practices did not quite demand that Bright must fall but enacted a critique of whiteness and patriarchal industrial capitalism directly onto the statue, disrupting the appearance of public consensus that monuments to the great and the good serve to uphold.

Triple Transformations is approached as an example of feminist performance that refuses to untangle industrial production from social reproduction, acknowledging that the two remain intertwined, especially for working-class women. ‘Monument to Working Women’ involved a procession by the three artists to the statue of John Bright, Rochdale mill owner and Liberal MP, in Rochdale’s Broadfield Park. Ambiguously dressed in overalls and pinnies, the artists’ makeshift uniforms, which closely resembled those of the women factory workers in Rochdale, evoked both the labour of cleaning, domestically and professionally, and factory work, referencing the transformation of one of Rochdale’s mills into a factory producing cleaning products, and the changing role of women in industry. Cameron, Ross, and Silver did not, nevertheless, clean Bright but re-inscribed his legacy onto the tall plinth with quotes from his speeches in Parliament: signs reading ‘our work, his glory’, ‘his profit, her labour’, and ‘her poverty, his reward’ where held up to passers-by, waived in front of Bright’s marble face, and finally pasted onto his plinth. More than 35 years later, Jasleen Kaur and her collaborators also chose Bright’s statue as a site and symbol of Rochdale’s collective, idealised, and profoundly exclusive identity. Kaur invited a group of women and gender non-conforming people from Rochdale’s Pakistani, Bengali and Punjabi communities to join her in a series of online conversations examining and responding to the contents of the local history archives at Touchstones, where they and their ancestors were largely under/unrepresented. In one of the films produced for Gut Feelings Meri Jaan, Kaur and her collaborators are seen washing Bright’s statue with yoghurt — a living culture. Archives and statues are set against and challenged by human bodies as carriers of history, feelings, and bacteria, digesting history into something decidedly unmonumental but fiercely dynamic.