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Locating Sylvia Pankhurst: Unfreezing time in the paintings and texts of Sylvia Pankhurst using documentary animation

http://www.locatingsylviapankhurst.com

This website documents Ashworth’s research on animation as a prototypical medium for analysing and reassessing Sylvia Pankhurst’s role in influencing political structures in the UK during a time of extraordinary change and revolution across Europe. A key aspect of Ashworth’s work in this area centres on the application, through theory and practice, of documentary film to Pankhurst’s work and methods of campaigning, drawing on the possibilities of animation to unfreeze her drawings of working women in Britain. Through the research Ashworth examines Pankhurst’s actions and life choices as a way of understanding the evolution of the modern self, British society, the artist’s role and world politics.

Pankhurst is best remembered as a key figure of the Suffragette movement, but her first ambition was to become an artist and she graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1906. Informed by primary research at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (which holds Pankhurst’s notebooks and manuscripts), British Film Institute, Museum of London, British Library and National Sound Archive, National Portrait Gallery, Pankhurst Centre Manchester and Women’s Library London, the website presents a shift in Ashworth’s practice towards working with the real, exploring what animation tools can bring to documentary film.

The examination of Pankhurst’s life and work is timely, with a number of important anniversaries occurring or imminent, including the 1913 event at which suffragette Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under the King’s Horse, the passing of the Representation of the People Act, 1918 and Eligibility of Women Act, 1918. The research was presented in the 2013 ‘¡Documentary Now!’ conference, London, and will be further disseminated through a presentation coinciding with the BP Spotlight ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’ exhibition, Tate Britain, London (16 September 2013 – 23 March 2014) and in an animated film to be published in 2014.