We’re delighted to welcome the Ducking Stool by Tamsyn Challenger to Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens. If you’ve visited recently, you may have spotted the brightly coloured piece made of wood, steel rod and polyurethane paints, standing out boldly against the elements of nature.
Tamsyn Challenger is an artist, curator and lecturer, whose work seeks to question wide-ranging socio-gender political ideas. She has been at the top of the Top 5 Guardian Exhibitions list twice in ten years, including with her first curation of ‘Free The Pussy!’.
Ducking Stool was made in 2012 as a protest sculpture after the arrest of the dissident punk rock and performance art group Pussy Riot in Russia, with the colours representing the balaclavas worn. Their 40-second civil disobedience performance protesting against Putin’s regime eventually led to a conviction.
“I think the ducking stool is an extraordinary way of silencing a woman – and it’s not really that long ago in our human history that such things happened. But I find that women are ducked still, constantly” -Tamsyn Challenger
This work contributed to the Rough Trade Records book ’Let’s Start a Pussy Riot’ with the goal of raising funds for the trial of Pussy Riot members. Tamsyn is one of a few contributors alongside Yoko Ono, Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, and several rock and punk musicians. She is the only artist to have created a new sculptural work for the book, shown for the first time as part of Monoculture.
“I wanted to have a little pop-up object in the book, but the paper was too expensive. So I ended up making the physical object. It was a crazy moment. I felt very strongly about what was happening to the Riot, because they’d just been arrested, and I thought that there was no finer metaphor for what had happened and for women’s experience anywhere.”
Tamsyn curated her first exhibition in 2018 in Summerhall, Edinburgh, which was made up largely of 2012 archive work from when the ‘riot’ sent out their call to arms to the creative community. The exhibition was featured on BBC Scotland with the Pussy Riot collective and BBC Edinburgh Nights. Click here to read more about Tamsyn Challenger’s work.