Hyena in Petticoats

Watch Hyena in Petticoats here presented together with Rebecca Redican’s Delay Six on 19 November at 7pm, introduced by Dr Ju Gosling, as part of the Live Art performance night at the Making History Together! 2020 Festival. Hyena in Petticoats is a defiant performance and exhibition that takes its starting point as the 18th-century writer and activist Mary Wollstonecraft, who was erased as a ‘hyena in petticoats’.

The performance is accompanied by a Zine with a range of activities you can join in with from home and which you can download here as an A4 PDF. The zine includes activities including placards to sloganise, templates for masks of defiance, and other creative resistance activities offering ways of remembering and creating living memorials to ensure we are not written out of history.

There is also a web-based exhibition that includes work previously created by Gobscure in response to Mary Wollstonecraft  but not available online until now, including 25 visual poems.

This is the pre-recorded video that was part of the live performance on 19 November at 7pm.

Gobscure talks about the background and context of Hyena in Petticoats on Together Unlocked! on 18 November 2020.

gobscure at the installation of their exhibition prisong at East Ham Library on 16 November 2017.

Although technically a solo artist, Gobscure is based in the North-east of England and uses the plural (we/our) to describe their work, which is a long-term reflection on having a fragmented mind. Gobscure is a self-taught writer, performer and artist working internationally, reclaiming spaces for and with marginalised, silenced people, mostly with little backing. Gobscure is also in the ‘shielding’ category of people most at risk from Covid-19.

Gobscure is a Together! Festival favourite who last appeared in 2017 with his exhibition Prisong. You can view the digital version of the exhibition and Gobscure’s talk at East Ham Library from the event page in our Archives section here.

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