Writer, Poet and Arts Organiser Sarah Wedderburn 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 studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, after which I eventually found my way into working in the arts at Riverside Studios in the late 70s/early 80s. After I became the mother of two children I had to find ways to work from home. I then became a freelance writer for arts organisations and others, a career that carried me through to the time when most people retire. My ‘retirement’, as I have entered my 70s, has been to work harder at my own writing. I began writing poetry seriously about 15 years ago, and completed an MA in Writing Poetry at The Poetry School/Newcastle University in 2018. My poetry has been published quite widely and I have a book ready to go when it finds a home. I am married to the artist John Davies and we live with our beloved lurcher in the middle of a field in rural East Kent.
I met Barbara in the late 1970s, when I was in my mid-twenties. David Gothard, who I was working for at Riverside Studios, had managed to negotiate a room for APG at the top of the building. My tiny office formed the narrow link between the upstairs corridor and the rooftop perch that she and John gratefully occupied. I got to know them both, but especially Barbara, as they passed through on their way to the long, mysterious meetings that took place in the APG lair.
People coming to APG mostly rushed by my desk like the White Rabbit, with no time to glance behind the old typewriter and towering piles of paper to where I sat. Both John and Barbara, with her slightly tentative manner, always stopped to talk. I was an art world novice. There was no reason for them to be so kind. But curiosity was part of Barbara’s spirit – and always, as I came to see, key to her work. She was kind to me from the start.
What impression did she make? With her cheekbones, bearing and style, I found her dazzling. She had the most beautiful deportment I have ever seen, and I soon learned she had studied ballet at Dartington and might have pursued a career as a dancer. To this day she remains my inspiration when I am battling (in vain) to stand up straight. She and her family subsisted on a shoestring, but she always looked great. Her hair was immaculate – the work of a top hairdresser who over the decades cut her hair for love. Her clothes were understated and few, but just right, and I remember her telling me how she and Deborah Brisley had escaped one day to the Kenzo store, which was having a sale, and dared each other into buying coats that were way beyond their budget, but fabulous. I remember Barbara’s. Long, black and worth every penny, it was the armour she needed to help her push APG across awesome boundaries into the bastions of government and industry – which of course she did, using all her wit and charm.
Over the next year or two, I came to see many facets of Barbara. Not just her dedication to APG and her dogged determination to make it work, but her real pleasure in meeting people and bringing them together. And talk about fierce principles! She was the first person I knew to acquire a Solidarność badge, when the labour movement in the Gdansk shipyards set about loosening the iron grip of the soviets in Poland. I remember she wore that badge against the resistance of one or two in the building who were still clinging to the old order.
In those days, everyone at Riverside worked insane hours, and to me and many others it became as much a home as a workplace. Much time was spent chatting in the bar, late into the evening. I got to know John and we became fond of each other as he talked amiably to me about his theory. He and Barbara invited me to APG events including The Government of the first and thirteenth chair which involved John’s Time Base roller and a set of stacking chairs left over from the days when Riverside was a film and TV studio. I can see those chairs now, with the flaking cream paint on their metal frames. I found the work gloriously odd and baffling. John responded by taking a lot of time to explain Time Base to me. Barbara responded by making me her close friend. Over and again, I witnessed her talent for drawing allies into the APG orbit, and for turning alliances into friendships.
Sometime in the early 80s I went away, had children, tried to earn a living in whatever way I could. Then, many years later, at around the time when APG was morphing into O+I, Barbara and John decamped from Notting Hill to their separate houses in Peckham. At the same time, I had moved from Fulham to Brixton. One day, Barbara rang me out of the blue. Would I join the board of O+I? I was taken aback. What would I have to contribute? With her characteristic persuasiveness, she insisted. All right, I said. I’ll do it Barbara on the understanding that I will be there for you. I don’t know enough about the work to do it differently, but you are my dear friend and my role will be to stand by your side.
After that, we were together often, at Anstey Road for wooden bowls of spinach soup, at John’s – where he formally declared me an IP! – at long O+I meetings, and at my home in Brixton. I swapped a rather terrible old car I had for a small work by John, a book piece which he told me was the prototype for the God is Great series, which is one of my most special possessions. Sorry about the car, John and Barbara. Another treasure is the birthday card that Barbara sent me one year – with a fragment of the banner from her 1993 St Petersburg performance. Meanwhile, we talked to each other deeply and often, on the phone or side by side. We spoke about our families, our relationships, our health, our lives and work – so many things – and I would sit beside her and try to reassure her when her energy dipped. That combination of driven commitment with a sometimes faltering confidence, made me love and admire her all the more. God, she had guts. Her vulnerability was so very touching, a mark of her enormous courage. Always, she pushed through.
I don’t think I knew, at the time, how seminal her work would turn out to be. In those years, for me, it was love, and loyalty to her and John, that carried me through all those hours of O+I discussion and minute-taking, frustration and breakthrough.
Over the years, I got to know Barbara’s wonderful family as well as great O+I members such Clive, Tatiana, Laura, Neil, and more. Such was the natural power of the still-extending network she created. We had great outings, such as one to the De la Warr Pavilion to see a remarkable exhibition of the late Ian Breakwell’s work – that day was sadly the beginning of John’s decline. Later she was kind enough to take me and a group of poets round John’s exhibition at the Serpentine, which was so generous. So many events and memories. Also, I was privileged to be one of the people Barbara included in her recorded conversations. She, Julie Lawson and Lisa Raine Hunt came down to the house in East Kent that John Davies and I had left London to live in. That is a beautiful memory, as is dear Barbara, in all her facets.
– Sarah Wedderburn
Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself is at Modern Art Oxford until 8 June 2025.