26. Disability and...Different Stories with Natasha Sutton Williams and EJ Scott

Show Notes

This month, Natasha Sutton Williams and EJ Scott chat about different voices, a research project initiated by the Ditchling Museum of Arts and Craft in partnership with Disability Arts Online. They explore the careers of women artists of the 20th century's Art and Crafts movement, who were associated with this small but significant museum in rural Sussex.

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The Disability And…Podcast gets right to the heart of some of the most pressing issues in arts, culture and beyond with a series of bold, provocative and insightful interviews with disabled artists, key industry figures and the odd legend. The Disability and…Podcast is currently monthly.

Introduction
Welcome to the Graeae and Disability Arts Online podcast 'Disability and...' Bringing together thoughtful discussion and debate. This month, Natasha Sutton Williams and EJ Scott chat about different voices, a research project initiated by the Ditchling Museum of Arts and Craft in partnership with Disability Arts Online. They explore the careers of women artists of the 20th century's Art and Crafts movement, who were associated with this small but significant museum in rural Sussex.

Natasha Sutton Williams
We are doing this podcast for Disability Arts Online and Graeae, and today we're going to be talking about 'Disability and Different Stories' in the context of the Ditchling Museum of Arts and Crafts. My name is Natasha Sutton Williams and I'm a writer, performer, composer and journalist. And I am queer and disabled.

EJ Scott
And I'm EJ, and I'm a curator and a dress historian. I work as well in the field of making hidden histories more visible, particularly with a focus on LGBTQIA+ histories. Yes. So I look at the history of fashion and dress. Textiles comes into play with that and that's particularly relevant to this project because basically it's a crossover, Natasha, between my two loves -my love of arts and crafts and textiles and fashion, but also my passion for queer history and finding hidden voices that we can draw out from collections. I often challenge this idea that they're really necessarily hidden. I think that actually, that they're not researched. And this project is giving us a great opportunity to sort of test this idea and really sort of prove its validity. The stories about the people that we're investigating are sitting there within the material culture and the visual culture in the museum's collections itself. We may not be able to unpack their entire private lives, but we can certainly use their work to investigate how the personal became productive, if you like.

Natasha Sutton Williams
And did you say that you're a dress historian? Could you just explain for people that aren't as versed in queer theory as you are, about how we're looking at these different -specifically women's -lives through a queer theory lens?

EJ Scott
Yes. So we'll get on to talking specifically about the women that we're investigating, but you're right to give it this context, to understand perhaps a little bit about the approach. Often, critics who say that sexuality or gender identity isn't important to the story of art, or the thinking around the history about design, or arts and crafts, argue that the personal is private, and therefore, it doesn't have a place and we don't need to know those things. What I would argue is that actually, the social context, as well as the motivation and the mode of creation of creativity is inseparable from personal experience. There's a very good example of an academic, Jane Hattrick, and Jane Hattrick did their PhD on Norman Hartnell, the couturier to the Queen. When she found his archives in the loft of his house after his death, and she was going through and studying his notes and his record keeping and his photography, but also the costumes that were left behind, -his designs that were left behind. She was trying to put together how the dresses that she was seeing in his loft appeared to be bigger and of different proportions to the dresses of the women he was designing for. With very, very robust research, she located that he was making them for himself and that actually, he was his test subject, right? So his queerness and his gender performativity was inseparable, little did the Queen know, from the work that he was producing. So it's this same idea that by understanding when we're looking at the records of designers and makers, that we may not get to the bottom of 'bed notch conspiracies'. We may not have evidence of the intimacies of their relationships, but what we do have evidence of is the way in which, particularly women, -this is very often the case when we're talking about women in relationships together- the intimacy that was a bond between them and that shaped the life that they lived, in turn had an impact on the creative work that they produced. So I'm not after evidence, nor do I think it's anyone's business of who had sex with whom, when. I'm after the evidence of the way in which lives are woven together, that then become modes of production, including not just design production, but business production, the business of arts and crafts as well. So that's something that I'm really keenly exploring when I'm looking at this project. It's how do these these private worlds and these intimacies between women and their lives they live, then spread out as practice into the major production of the work that we're going to look at, when we consider these designers and business women.

Natasha Sutton Williams
And I guess it's also worth saying this idea that because now... this idea within history that whatever era that we look at, we as contemporaries think 'Oh, we're the most modern that we could possibly be, we're the most progressive that we could possibly be.' But actually at that time, they thought they were the most modern and the most progressive, whichever era that you look in. And also this idea that we make discoveries about health and about sexuality, and maybe we have like definitions and labels that other people didn't have. So again with this idea of disability in the context of mental health, which I think is now much more prevalent that people talk about mental health, but also the practices of artists and how their art actually affected their health. And we will talk about someone whose art literally has a detrimental effect to her body. But let's talk about what the project is about that you and I are conducting at the Ditchling Museum of Arts and Crafts, who it's with and why it's important. So the Ditchling Museum is a museum that comprises of 20th Century craftspeople and their work. This is kind of turn of 20th Century and these craftspeople are trying to revive traditional craft. They're concerned by industrialisation and that traditional arts and crafts are going to be forgotten as modernity goes forth. Also the craftspeople that were involved in Ditchling were of national repute and moved to Ditchling for its idyllic setting.

EJ Scott
And I think one thing that Ditchling museum does very well and one of the intentions of this project, which is called Different Voices, is that they're willing to unpack the romanticisation of the Arts and Crafts movement. So Ditchling does have this romantic... it's the idyllic setting, it's in the countryside, it's this whole idea of back to nature and making. What Ditching Museum of Arts and Crafts -as a longtime admirer of the museum- what I think it does so well is explore the way that we can unpack the over-romanticisation of craft. And so by looking in this project at Different Voices we're building on top of work that's already been done, for example, on the Women's Work exhibition. And understanding that actually, we think of arts and crafts almost as soft, it's so caught up in this sort of idea that it was a romantic movement that's aligned with William Morris and it's all anti-industrialisation, and it's about the handmade. Well actually, the women that we're looking at were very interested in large scale business production and that actually when we talk about modernity, arts and crafts as well, women played a very large role in arts and crafts being thought of through a modern lens at this time. So with the two women that I'm particularly interested in investigating, Hilary Bourne and Barbara Allen, they started working together from 1935 and they're in work together for 40 years as a partnership. They were at a very particular time of the Arts and Crafts movement that was... not only that you could have these handmade, beautiful, romantically produced (I keep coming back to this word) but actually women as consumers, bringing in the consumption of craft into their homes, required the production of arts and crafts material of these products on a larger scale to more people. That is modern, right. So I'm very interested in how progressive the two women that I'm looking at are, not only the the design aesthetics, but also their business practices, the scale of their production and the reach of their work into very, very big public buildings, on movies and all sorts of things. So we can get up to that. It is really important, this idea that arts and crafts has been modern and that this was a time in which women were involved in the development of thinking and consuming that modernity as well.

Natasha Sutton Williams
It's funny with arts and crafts, because it feels like it's alternately soft and hard. Soft, being 'Oh, that's kind of women's work' -that's just their hobbies, just get them to embroid something while the men go to work. Yet, at the turn of the century, with these men who in the UK, really started to get interested in this crafts movement it becomes this really artistic, really professional intellectual craft. And then again, women are kind of almost like thrown under the bus and then the men are taking over. So again, this idea of different voices and kind of exactly as you're saying, bringing these women to the fore, bringing these business women to the fore, who were actually really integral at this kind of mid century level.

EJ Scott
And bearing in mind as well that women weren't allowed to join The Arts Workers' Guild until 1964. So there's these homo-social male spaces surrounding networking and having this club of men, so obviously, women were operating their own networks outside of this. They were in business, they did have businesses across London and across the UK. They were networking together. So there's also this business space and this production space. So Hilary Bourne and Barbara Allen have their workshops in Ditchling, but they've got their shops/offices in London. So they're very much part of a scene, I think that's overlooked and under investigated, where women were networking amongst themselves with business intentions. I think that there's a really good article written by Suzette Warden and Gill Seddon, where they talk about women designers in Britain in the 1920s and 30s. They really make the point that the practice of design is judged by its output where designers are pitted as the heroes of the production process. And obviously, designers do play a really significant role, but this decontextualizes production from the consumption and it glorifies, and tends to have a gender bias of glorifying men at the forefront of the movement. And this singularises it right, whereas... and dismisses the idea of collaborative approaches and the social context that can go around them, and this very much... often these collaborative approaches are often the approaches that women take with their work. That's what we see, with with Barbara and Hilary that they worked together for 40 years, and that their workshop was full of women. So what was the social context? And how did those be women's spaces affect what they were producing? I think it's a really interesting and fascinating line of enquiry.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, and you've got this idea that women are pitted as consumers and men as producers. This idea that, again, when women are working away on their little embroideries and that's women's work, and then men take it, and then they go, 'You're not allowed in our club!' You know...'We're the only ones that can do this!' And you're just like... I mean, it's just classic.

EJ Scott
At the end of the day, Barbara Allen and Hilary Bourne were leading British mid century textile designers. They lived together, they worked together, they designed they weaved, they ran a profitable business together for nearly 40 years. What we're looking at is the evidence of this that's in the Ditchling Museum of Arts and Crafts collection. So there's photography of their workshops. We had such a blast the day we went out, didn't we Natasha? Looking through what was there in the collection; all these different types of evidence. There's literally samples, the most wonderful collection of samples, of their work, of their weaving. There's photography of the workshops, but there's also local records that feed into it as well. Including plays that they were on staging with local productions. Also, I was really struck by magazines that featured their work, and in particular there was a very famous work of theirs, that they're not really credited for in the way that other designers are, including the 1951 Royal Festival Hall, the interiors, the textiles for that. So when you go on the V&A's website and you look up 'The Festival of Britain 1951' there is actually a photo of the inside of the Royal Festival Hall -black and white photo of the interiors, which is very modern, there's brutalist architecture and underneath credited for the furniture are Robin and Lucienne Day. But strikingly in the background, there's these incredibly Modernist curtains floor to ceiling. So really, really high ceilings in the brutalist building, and they're the work of Hilary Bourne and Barbara Allen and yet their name doesn't appear credited in the photograph. So they've been overlooked, you know, they aren't as renown as Robin and Lucienne Day for example and to the extent that they don't get mentioned when they do, for the interiors that they co-produce. Again, that's why I think it's really exciting to bring out their story and to look closely at their work because they were really, really, really significant. They did the interior, the soft interior of the Royal Albert Hall, they designed costumes for Ben Hur, they produced materials for first jet planes, the interior. These are very modern production job lots, right? Like you couldn't get more modern than the Royal Festival Hall.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, and Southbank Cinema at the time and Heathrow Airport, just as that had been opened...

EJ Scott
Exactly! Jet planes, I mean, come on!

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah. And also this idea of, which I think is really interesting, the brutalist architecture versus the hand-loomed weaves and the natural vegetable dyes. Again, that kind of contrast, which feels really... you know that could be done now and that would feel very, very exciting and modern.

EJ Scott
Yes, and to sort of describe their work. It's... it IS Modernist. It does have these brutalist values; these textiles that are navy blue, verging on black, with made with natural dyes, Blackberry tips but with one little white thread going through them. You know, those really, really fit with those interiors and the design of the time, and the aesthetics at play. When we think about the Bauhaus, you know, when we think about the brutalist, this is very much of that time. However, as you say, they're using natural dyes, but the quantity of Sussex Blackberry tips that must have gone into the vat to make the dye for that size, then brings us over to the conversation about how big were the vats that they were using?

Natasha Sutton Williams
(laughs) Industrial?!

EJ Scott
Yes, but it's a really significant point to make, right? This wasn't 'we're hand-dyeing some small things in the workshop in Ditchling using some Blackberries we just went picking when we went out for our walk with our dog'. This is a completely different scale of production. When you think about those jobs, those commissions that we've just talked about, -REALLY big quantities in the orders, right? Costuming for Ben Hur, 1000s of people on set; this was a massive engagements. So, very interesting to see that they're managing to hold on to some of the values of production such as natural dyes, but that they can do it in this scale and it must be... must have something to do with that about the machinery, the equipment that they were using, and that itself, it must have been modern as well.

Natasha Sutton Williams
I mean, it feels very contemporary at the moment and this kind of... especially I think, that the lockdown has kind of concentrated this idea, but we're kind of reaching back towards nature... (you know, we were just talking about having all these plants that are on our houses and flats before we started this conversation) the idea of like reaching back into nature and everyone moving out of London to go have gardens and green space and this idea. How many people on Instagram are now making these kind of like, traditional ancient natural dyed costumes and all this kind of stuff? And it was really exciting when we did go for our kind of visitation day at the museum and there was a little book about the natural dyes and how to create the different colours and all of this stuff, and it's just... it's like a process as old as time, but they were utilising that for their contemporary context and as you say, these like massive industrial....at an industrial scale.

EJ Scott
Yeah, I personally was so affected by the appeal of the design. It felt minimalist, cutting edge, really contemporary palettes. You know, these navy blues, these reds shot with whites, you know, like really, really, really sexy work, you know!

Natasha Sutton Williams
Using bamboo within it as well. I think they went over, it might have been someone else, but they went over to Japan and went and spent time with a specific potter I think it was, and dyer. But again, this kind of Asian/Japanese influence, minimalism coming into the design as well. So,they were really... you know, they were doing it, they were.

EJ Scott
Again, that comes from Ditchlings' own local history, because it has strong ties with Japanese ceramicists. So it's really quite interesting that they were going... that they had this relationship with Ditchling, came back -I guess the sad thing that we need to share with the listeners is the tragic story that Barbara died in a fire in a hotel in Cambridge in 1972, and as a consequence of that, Hilary moved back to Ditchling. She jumped out a window and survived and was very badly injured, but her grief brought her back to Ditchling and she closed the business. She wasn't able to cope, she wasn't well, she wasn't able to continue the work. I really think that says something about Ditchling being a retreat and a home and a place of comfort for her with family that she had there. But I think as well, it's something that we are seeing, as you say, in our contemporary lives with the lockdown that people are moving out into the countryside again aren't they? As a spiritual retreat and a healthy place to be. And then we're seeing again at the same time, this resurgence in art and craft practices as well. So I think you're absolutely right, it feels timely to be having this investigation, when we look at what's going on around us today. It's so interesting to find the relevance of the past to our lives today as well. I think it really helps us locate that it's a funny old time we're living in, -it really is, and finding solace in nature and then that feeding out into creative artistic practice is something that's healthy for all of us to do, and something that has had a long tradition, particularly in this area in Sussex.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, and stemming from that, there was this period for Hilary where she goes into this deep depression. Actually 13 years after Barbara's death, Hilary's sister Joanna, who also lived in Ditchling, -she was brought up in Ditchling, she suggested 'Why don't you create the museum?' And that is essentially why the Ditchling museum exists; because it was this kind of massive project that Hllary could get into and showcase and celebrate their work together, all of the other artists that were involved in the kind of Ditchling craft circle, and that's why the museum exists. And again this idea of how does mental health and depression and anxiety... it doesn't have to have something be produced from it. This idea, this kind of capitalist idea we must produce we must create. But it is interesting that if you go there, you wouldn't know that this came out of essentially somebody's grief and not only some random person, but actually someone that was really integral to the Ditchling crafts circle.

EJ Scott
That I think is really interesting, because the fact that she grieved so hard, you know, the fact that she couldn't continue her business really speaks volumes. Well, it says everything about how absolutely integral to their success, their collaboration.

Natasha Sutton Williams
They intertwined, yeah.

EJ Scott
Yeah 100%, 100%. And this idea that neither of them got married, they did live together all this time. They were in business together, they were sharing a hotel room when the fire happened, in a public space, a public venue. I think that we don't need, like I said right at the start, we don't need to know the intricacies of their intimate life. But what we do know is that they were intimate, and that this was core to the success of their business. They worked together, they lived together, they created together and they ran a business together. So she couldn't do it without her. I think that's so tragically sad, but it speaks volumes as to the importance of the relationship to the creative outcome.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, for them, definitely. There was a lot of men who were craftspeople in Ditchling and we've kind of gone away and looked at all the women that were involved and there was a woman called Amy Sawyer. She was before Hilary and Barbara, and she was actually even before any of the men got got going! She was Victorian, she was born in 1863, and she was a very unusual and prolific artist who had an interest in folk tales, and in witches and in fairies. She was really a polymath artist, she was a painter, illustrator, textile artist, playwright, costume designer, seamstress. You know, she was she was basically...

EJ Scott
Polymath!

Natasha Sutton Williams
...everything. She exhibited at the Royal Academy and at other galleries, and she's almost forgotten now. But interestingly, her plays, which were called her 'Sussex Village Plays' they were written while she lived in Ditchling. Remember, Ditchling is small, right? So she actually recorded the histories of her friends, of the artists that were there, and included various members of the Guild, but also Joanna and Hilary Bourne, the sisters. And Hilary performed in Sawyer's plays as a child. When I mentioned at the start, she became disabled through the use of toxic paints and this withered her hand. So this idea of this kind of cliche of an artist suffering for their arts, because she was unbeknownst to her obviously, she was using toxic paints and I think they went under her fingernails and that kind of created created the problem. But again, this idea of disability and working within your disability...

EJ Scott
...and also disabilities that you inherit over your life. You're not necessarily born with a disability, to have to experience a disability. And as we progressively get older, and as I think this idea of Covid and lockdown and all of us having the time in our own ways to sort of re-evaluate the pace that we're living life, to re-evaluate the cost that work and travel and the intensity of the production that's demanded of us within the professional realm... You know, these things come at a price, and often that price is to our bodies, our health and our well being. So it's both our mental health and our physical health and so I think it's such an important message that I think we need to talk more about in society, really. The idea that there's the disabled and the non-disabled is a false construct. Who knows what's going to happen to us? and in the world we live in what are we doing to care for ourselves, but also understand that disability is something that can happen over time, and that we all need to be conscious of wanting to live in a world that has fair access, usable services. These aren't a concern that should just be the concern for those who are disabled now. This is a complete concern that we should all hold, and we should all be caring about. Opening up. It's not that a building is inaccessible to those with disabilities, it's that it's not yet made accessible and I think that that's really important when we start to think about what can we learn from the past that's relevant to us today. That for me, Amy Sawyer's story I find particularly relevant to our understanding of the place of disability in modern society, and how we cater and care and provide access for those living with disabilities.

Natasha Sutton Williams
About 22% of the population are classified as disabled. So that's essentially one quarter of the population okay? And yet, things are so inaccessible, and this idea exactly as you said, as you get older there are more ailments etc, etc, and people become disabled. So this idea of "Oh well, I'm not interested in that because it doesn't personally affect me" or "Well, it affects my grandma, but she's really old". Again, as you say, this kind of idea with Covid, suddenly people are very aware of their health. And this is something that people haven't had to think about because essentially this is a... let's call it a plague and at times of plague, everything shuts down. In the Victorian era with like Tuberculosis and stuff like this, people were just much more aware of that. I think people are much more aware as well about mental health and anxieties, and like, meeting people and going out, all this kind of stuff really does have an effect. And as you say, the idea of disability does actually affect us all, and we should all be interested in it, and we should all be interested in making things accessible. I know that you've run a lot of online events during Covid, and this idea of let's keep that going, even when things open up. Let's have these different ways of accessing events, and I know there's some disabled people that are like "I've never been more engaged with art and culture, because I've been able to actually see it". So again, this idea that I think is really important is that we keep on going "Okay, how can we facilitate different people's needs?" And that's not because my friend happens to be deaf, or something like this; it has to be more ranging than just our kind of close proximity.

EJ Scott
Yeah, and as a cultural producer, I'm just always pushing myself to improve my practice around these things as well, you know. Whenever I'm doing anything visual online, for a Zoom event, making sure there's an audio description at the start of it, and making sure my guests are invited to do that, as well, you know. Just trying to get these mechanisms in place as standard good practice when you're producing events. Understanding that we're moving into a realm of blended accessibility, so as you say, not just going, "Oh, lockdowns over, -let's forget zoom events now". Absolutely not. I think we're moving into a more textured form of accessibility, and more multiple versions of what it means to engage, to put on events, to be involved. And I'm interested in seeing how we can open that up in research practices as well. How to make museums, their collections and material culture available to more people. I think, increasingly, museums are getting very good at this, providing accessible spaces as a priority and redesigns when they have the chance to redesign spaces. But I'm also interested in things like loan boxes, where you can take the museum to people. Where you can take collections out of the museum. All these things are really coming up for me both with what we've been thrust into, because of Covid over the course of this project, but with this project as well. You know, looking back and thinking about Amy's history and the fact that she inherited the disability has, for me, been a very interesting thing to sit on and understand both as an artist and a cultural producer. It does really always... it always helps to be reminded that we can get better and better and come up with more creative solutions all the time, and that accessibility isn't pre-defined and pre-determined. What it means is that we can expand these boundaries, and these online digital events, I think have been a very good example of that. As you say, that they've just brought history and art and design and performance to wider audiences through the platform. I'm interested in seeing as we progress, how we can use spaces, like museums, but then broadcast out of them as well. So that we're not just doing online Zooms from our home, but that we can do online Zooms from the museum as well. So all of these things I think we get to explore with this project and it makes it very exciting. Bringing different voices in, brings more to all voices. I always say that queer history isn't for the queer, and the history of disability isn't for the disabled. The more we know about the world we live in and the different textures of life, the richer all our worlds are, and our understanding of our place within it and the people that we live with.

Natasha Sutton Williams
And the way that we behave towards others. There is a thing of "We don't know what we don't know". And because with disability as well, because it's such a huge spectrum and there's so many different types of impairments and disabilities and illnesses, we can't tick every box all all at once. But we can certainly keep on working, and as you said, in different spaces. Predominately, I work in theatre you know. This idea of let's try out different modes, let's try out audio description, alongside creative integration with access, alongside relaxed performances, and all this kind of stuff. I mean, speaking of events, we are -fingers crossed- going to do a couple of interactive live events at the museum. We don't know exactly when, but that's going to be on the website. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you're thinking in terms of of your project? And, of course, we're going to definitely do Zoom as well as live, aren't we?

EJ Scott
Yes, and I would encourage people to keep their eyes on on the website actually moving forward. When we'll be able to (hopefully soon, depending on how the next opening up stage goes) really think about putting some definite dates in the diary. I would certainly like to do a pride event where we queer Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, where we bring out objects from the collection, that relate to the people that were researching and give audience access to them. And also engage with some performance in that space. I'm really interested in opening up the back of the museum and making it Front of House, bringing collections out, bringing talks out, explaining and sharing research in progress. For me, that's a very dynamic way of working, but it also disrupts the hierarchy of museums as well, so that it's not just sort of top down finished curatorial learnings and research presented to the audience on a text panel. You know, I think museums are becoming much more dynamic spaces now, bringing people in with their ideas and their knowledges and their lived experiences to contribute to this engagement process. That is research as engaged in curation, as co-community collaboration. These are the kinds of things that really excite me and so it's certainly what I'm going to be thinking about, with queering Ditchling Museum of Arts and Crafts.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, you're right because when we went on our visitation day, Donna, who's the curator, took us in one by one into the back, into the archives. And that was one of the most special moments for me, because it's like I'm getting to see something secret and something hidden. And I don't care that it's in amongst all these other carpets and rolled up pieces. I think exactly as you say, it's this kind of seeing the archive... imagine going into the British Museum and getting to go in and see that warehouse full of all these different... that's where the really exciting stuff occurs.

EJ Scott
So we will definitely be bringing some of the collection out and talking about the work of these women and opening up to conversation. That's really what I'm interested in, that collaborative process with communities. So yeah, looking forward to planning that this summer.

Natasha Sutton Williams
In terms of, well nothing is pinned down, but in terms of ... because you're working as a curator, I'm working as a theatre maker if artist essentially. And this idea of doing an audio described tour of the Museum, of certain pieces, but having possibly the three women, Hilary, Barbara, and Amy, basically giving you a guided tour of the museum and this idea of what do they think of pieces? What do they think?

EJ Scott
Gorgeous!

Natasha Sutton Williams
What made them gossip... Obviously, it is fictional, but this idea that you get to view the museum from their eyes, so I think that could be really fun. And you can have it online because it's audio described, you wouldn't have to be there.

EJ Scott
So interesting Natasha. I'm so enjoying working with you. It's so nice to have this creative, dynamic element to what we're exploring.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, and it feeds each other doesn't it? So that's really exciting. I guess, to kind of end on our intentions of the project and this idea that it's called Different Voices. But the idea that different voices are our voices already.

EJ Scott
Yeah, they're our voices, they're the voices of everyone around us. You're exactly right, they're the majority of voices, actually. So it's it's different voices as a majority and a way, consequently, of listening to them, a way of hearing more about the reality of the world we live in because it's a very rich, vibrant place, because our voices are different from one another.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, and also that you and I feel very strongly towards, and also Ditchling, the idea of bringing these female craftspeople, giving them a platform, highlighting them. This idea that 52% of the population are women and yet there's only three women that have ever been discussed in history: Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth the first, - you know, horrible one- and Bloody Mary!

EJ Scott
It's been a pleasure to talk to you, Natasha.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yeah, great to speak to you and let's keep on going.

EJ Scott
We will have more information and the programme will develop, so the website is definitely the place to look to find out what's going on soon.

Natasha Sutton Williams
Yes, absolutely. Well, great to speak to you.

EJ Scott
You too. Bye.

Outro
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