Art Teacher and Curator Jane Trowell was one of nine women Barbara Steveni included in her project Conversations Between Ourselves. In this series of interviews, Steveni highlighted the often unacknowledged work of women supporting and administrating the Artist Placement Group and later O+I. Now, participants in the project share more information about their careers and work, as well as reflecting on Barbara Steveni and her work.
I first encountered APG and Barbara Steveni in 1991 when I started working with Platform:London, the arts-activist-research group. Platform began in the early 1980s amid the extremity of Thatcherism. It arose as a horizontally-organised activist practice among students who were restlessly questing for more effective political art, and also political action that was imaginative and mobilising. I came from a background in the arts, education, Leftist feminism and the peace movement, and I was looking for new ways of working, in which Platform, APG and Barbara played a role.
Some background helps explain my relationship with Barbara. After grammar school in Edmonton, London, I passed entrance exams to study at the University of Cambridge where I took a degree in music and history of art. My college there had only started admitting women students two years previously, and across the university, students and staff were still overwhelmingly white male but I learnt to operate, albeit with some contortions. Politically uncomfortable with that entire milieu, I went on to work as community assistant on a large-scale community theatre project in Basildon, a post-war New Town in Essex. However I then got a job as assistant curator at Kettles Yard Gallery, Cambridge. This privilege served to deepen my political and economic critique, particularly around classism, racism and sexism in contemporary art practices, in the history of European art, and also in me.
As a result, in 1991/2 I decided to train as an art teacher and since then have taught part-time in secondary, further and higher education as well as in teacher-education, alongside Platform work.
On joining Platform in 1991/2, I soon immersed myself in learning about Platform’s early influences: Joseph Beuys’ concept and practices of Social Sculpture as well as his performances/actions and pedagogies; Die Grünen (the then newly formed German Green Party) and associated social and economic movements such as Aktion Dritte Weg (Action Third Way); APG and radical Leftist theatre practices in the UK such as Red Ladder, Talawa, Spare Tyre, DV8, Trouble and Strife, 7:84, Welfare State International, the emerging performance art/live art practices, as well as influences from Eastern European contemporary theatre such as director Tadeusz Kantor and Gardzienice theatre company whose work Richard Demarco was bringing to audiences in the UK.
APG’s placements were an early inspiration for Platform, and other members of the group had got to know John Latham and Barbara Steveni personally. APG’s tenet ‘Context is half the work’ was flowing in Platform’s veins in the conceptualising and planning of projects and actions, most of which took place out in the street in non-art spaces.
For me, getting to know Barbara was a slow but lovely thing. She used to turn up at our parties in the late 1990s and 00s in her leather trousers, and wow the roomful of 30- and 40-somethings with her humour, charm and engaging conversation. Barbara was marvellous at communicating as an equal across the generations, yet she was reticent at acknowledging her pivotal role in APG.
It was at the Arts Council England’s Interrupt conference in 2004 that Barbara mentioned to me, with seeming great surprise, about a proposal to honour her practice. Curator Anna Harding was working with her on archiving her pivotal role in APG as well as Barbara as an individual artist.
Through meeting at the many subsequent events, walks and talks exploring Barbara’s process in I am an Archive, we began to resonate with each other’s experience. There were lots of cups of tea. A key overlap between us was that although women had been key in Platform’s founding as in APG’s, and many individual women including me were central to the work throughout, for its first 25 years Platform was white-male dominated. I’m glad to say that in the last decade or so this bias has radically flipped, but I mention the gender dynamics as it relates to why Barbara and I connected to each other’s critique and tactics.
I was honoured when Barbara and curator Lisa Raine approached me to take part in the project Conversations Between Ourselves. It was inevitable that our particular conversation would flow onto gender and the navigations of sexism and ego, but also our strategies to ensure our visibility, to influence, challenge and disrupt.
Barbara is a source of inspiration. She taught me many things about how to become an elder while always keenly engaging with new ideas and younger people. I am grateful for her lively enquiring presence, her assiduous work, her generous warmth, her humour and her affection.
– Jane Trowell
Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself is at Modern Art Oxford until 8 June 2025.