Introduction

Any investigation of women making art by necessity addresses history. The very fact that the work of women artists is still less well known than that of their male counterparts raises questions concerning women's historical role in cultural production and in the construction of art's histories. The phenomenon of women making art intervenes at this juncture, severing any seamless link between ‘history’ as a series of past events, people and observable facts, from ‘history’ as the process of recounting such events, evaluating the facts, and bringing them forth in the present. Both the conventional historical record and the recording process fail at the point of women's art, the very point at which they would need to recognise and account for difference.