Marie Yates


Marie Yates is a British fine conceptual artist whose artwork centers on addressing female representation and sexual difference in media and society. She was mentored by John Latham and exhibited alongside The Artist Placement Group. She is best known for her landscape works combining installation, text and imagery.

Life and Education

Yates studied fine art at Manchester Regional College of Art from 1957 to 1959. She also pursued Degrees in Fine Art at Hornsey College of Art and The Royal College of Art. She also studied Social Anthropology at University College London, and earned her master's degree in Fine Art from Goldsmith's College of Art in 1981. In 1989 Yates received a Master of Arts Degree from the University of Derby in Photographic Studies.
Marie Yates' artistic career began in the late 1960s, creating abstract paintings in her studio in Cornwall. Rejecting the ideal American Modernist aesthetic, she chose to begin exploring and developing her own perception of Modernism in a societal context. Experimenting with minimal installations, she still felt limited by her status as a female artist. Throughout the 70's the artist turned to the Conceptual art movement and became known for her incorporation of landscape images and text to her works, for which she received much acclaim.
She began teaching fine art and photography in 1971 at a variety of major art colleges in the United Kingdom, including The Royal College of Art, Chelsea College of Arts, and University of the Arts London. She retired from teaching in 1991 and left England to live in Greece that same year, where she has lived since.

Career

Yates started off as an abstract painter in the 1960s, working in her own studio in St. Ives Cornwall. Seeing the inequalities of the art world at the time she went to school and pursued a degree in Fine Art in an attempt to explore the issue. She turned to the conceptual art movement trying to find a new way of being a woman artist; Many institutions placed dominance primarily on males, leaving female artists in secondary positions. During the early 1970s, she focused on the dynamics between text and image through the use of photography, allowing her to accomplish explorations in landscape, images of other women, representation, and sexual politics. From 1978 onward, her works started taking a turn in the themes of ideology, sexual differences, and fantasy with montages and mixed media. Her work emphasizes her views towards art as a social construction rather than an aesthetic. In the late 1990s she began to expand her explorations in media with digital techniques.
By the 1990s, Yates' work was being exhibited throughout England, taking a part in a many major galleries such as Riverside Studios and The Institute of Contemporary Arts. She also participated in a number of exhibitions in the US and Europe, including the New Museum. Her works are in the collections of Tate, Arts Council, and The British Council.

Notable Artworks

The Field Workings (1971-1974)

A project that was conceived in March of the year 1971 after emerging from Hornsey College, an installation project with slides that a documentation of journeys made in the West Country landscape. It was well received by many and led to Yates receiving small grants, commissions and shows for these works that were soon developed into gallery installations.
Starting out from London the initial project lasted three years was made possible by John Latham and his family who would occasionally make their Barn at the Buckfastleigh as a centre. This project consisted of thirteen Field Working Documents, with them being thoroughly planned and researched ahead of time. The research involved heavy studies of the Ordnance Survey Maps, train and bus timetables, and a variety of historical maps. In the process Yates was able to discover remote areas that would have otherwise been likely untouched. This project later influenced other works that involved journeys in different areas of England, Wales, and Scotland. Each of these journeys was accompanied by numerous people.
The main intention was to document an event that did not happen as it was-epiphanous. Yates found importance in constructing a story and used literal and visual narration to express non existent events; the sense that one traveled, one arrived, then left, the place remained the same, as if no one had ever been there. In her later years she began to question the hierarchical relation between the viewer and the artist, never including her own image, began to make it so that one becomes aware of looking and being looked.
George Brecht’s technique in distanciation inspired Yates to use her work to place the viewer in a sense of reality. The use of a realistic atmosphere helped Yates in emphasizing the importance of representation. As a result, the project was able to present tensions between the construction of meaning and representation.

The Field/Music/Performances (1973)

An improvised musical piece based on a score by Marie Yates with primitive forms references, sounds and symbols, as well as natural phenomena such as with Rain in The Face along with several other friends and characters. The work took place at The Midland Group Gallery and was part of the Field Workings Exhibit in the Arnolfini Gallery.

Signals (1975-1978)

"Signals" was constructed for the exhibition Artists Over Land at the Arnolfini Gallery in 1975. This piece marked a significant shift in works of landscape. Curated by Lucy R. Lippard in Chicago and New York, the installation work was formed by three new pieces: A wall, a slide, and a documentation piece. In this piece the spectator held the prime role. While the documentation piece was created beforehand, the wall and slide pieces were made on site. Yates explained that the three parts of the installation and their relationship to one another all stressed the function of time. The part of the artwork that was mounted on the exhibit wall consisted of 28 texts and one color photograph arranged in the perimeter of a rectangle. Yates related this arrangement to that of the four sides of a field.

Image/woman/text (1979)

The creation of this artwork was a response to an invitation by Lucy R. Lippard to the artist to be featured in the international exhibition named ISSUE: Social Strategies by women artists, which exhibited work that dealt with specific social and political issues such as concerns with health, ecology, unemployment, war alienation, schooling and violence against women. "Image/woman/text" consists of a series of photographs on two panels. One of these was xeroxed and painted over as a means of reducing the information to the observer. The second panel used the same images with high gloss and restoring the information that was obstructed on the left panel. It is also important to know that the images chosen by the artist are also documentary images of women. Yates explained these choices in her art piece as way of addressing that often images of women are "notoriously malleable", and subject women to merely becoming "signs emptied of meaning".

The Time and the Energy (1982)

Marie Yates created this photo essay after being invited by photographers Victor Brugin and John Tagg to participate in the first issue of a journal titled Formations, which would be focused on feminist and social cultural theory, history and debate. "The Time and the Energy" was featured in this issue, titled "Formations of Pleasure" and released in 1983. The artist stated that this art piece addressed "filmic pleasures".

Selected exhibitions