Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade
Garrard’s work Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade depicts fragments of a self-portrait by the Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster, created around 1630, who holds her paintbrush and palette and stares out at the viewer. Leyster was almost erased from history after her death, by dealers who attributed her work to male contemporaries like Frans Hals. The portrait is created with a central panel using plaster, then reinforced with layers of a fabric called scrim, often used in theatre design. Garrard copied the self-portrait as a fresco, intending the acrylic paint to be absorbed differently by the plaster and scrim, and build up in uneven layers. The self-portrait is framed by cascading plaster figurines of the Virgin and Child, based on one which Garrard’s Catholic mother placed by her bed when she was a child.
The ‘Model Triptych’ series re-creates the self-portraits of historic women artists who were once highly regarded, but fell into posthumous obscurity: Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Judith Leyster. Garrard created these works after attending an exhibition called the Women’s Art Show at Nottingham Castle in 1982. She later described how she ‘had a feeling of literally being encircled and wrapped by women’s paintbrush-marks spanning over 500 years’ and that this was the ‘first feeling [she] had of a sense of place, of continuity […] like a discovery of loss.’ She also described experiencing an ‘anger and rage that for so many years there had been this absence that [she] couldn’t even identify until now’. Garrard has described the act of repainting women artists self-portraits as an act of reclamation and celebration of their achievements in the face of historical occlusion. Madonna Cascade is framed on three sides by a plaster frame which unravels and extends outwards into the space of the college where the work is hung. The protruding structure of the work evokes the act of framing and re-framing and represents a reflection on who has and has not been included in the traditional art historical canon. The series was selected to be shown in the New Art exhibition at Tate Gallery in 1983 following her solo-show at Kettle’s Yard entitled Frames of Mind (1983) which Garrard created the series for.
Garrard was among the first artists to donate to The Women’s Art Collection in 1992 and this work was on display as part of the opening exhibition in September of that year. In a letter written on paper with a beautiful rose-themed letterhead, she informed the President of the College that the work ‘requires me to install it on site’ somewhere where it would not be ‘tripped over’. In its location in the College, where it is safe from even the clumsiest of passers-by at the bottom of a stairwell, the plaster sculpture seems almost to emerge from the white-brick wall, embodying the very essence of this collection of women artists.
