The Visual Cultures of Greenham Common

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) was a women-only camp established in protest against nuclear proliferation and the Cold War ideology of deterrence that fuelled the arms race.1 It occupied the periphery of the US military base at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, where nuclear cruise missiles were kept and from which they were deployed in military exercises monitored and disrupted by Cruisewatch, an anti-nuclear initiative separate from but overlapping with the peace camp. Peace camp “campers”, “stayers”, visitors, and supporters organised a series of creative performative protests on and off site, including witches’ dances, teddy bears’ picnics, and mock weddings between protesters and nuclear warheads.2 The perimeter fence of the airbase was soon transformed into a permanent, if informal, gallery of protest, displaying banners and hosting a wealth of visual and material interventions which were documented by amateur and professional photographers, including the women-only Format Photographers Agency (1983–2003). The fence also became the target of regular breaches by activists to highlight the fragility of the nuclear military complex. Greenham women used a range of print media for communication with their networks and the recruitment of new supporters, including newsletters, posters, postcards, and leaflets, most of which were richly illustrated with original artwork.

From an art-historical perspective, this material teems with visual iconographies, drawing on ancient myths and symbols that had been mobilised in women’s movements since the 1960s. In addition to the reclamation of witches and witches’ circles, spider webs were successfully exploited in craftivist performance and evoked in drawing, as a motif of solidarity, connectivity, and strength free from force.3 Mother and child Christian iconographies were revisited and reconfigured, in evocation of the established maternalism of women’s peace movements. Greenham queered and collectivised the nuclear family through visual means as well as in lived experience, by troubling representational tropes of mothering, social and biological reproduction, and its associations with futurity, as well as by expanding care-giving networks beyond kinship or romance.4 Many artworks were created at or in reference to Greenham, often by artists with direct experience of the camp, including textile and installation work by Janis Jefferies, Margaret Harrison’s multiple iterations of the reconstructed perimeter fence, Tina Keane’s films of protest and reverie, Thalia Campbell’s textile collages and banners, performances by Sister Seven, posters by See Red Women’s Workshop, and watercolours and drawings by Tabitha Salmon. However, established and emergent art-historical iconographies and protest tropes do not merely function in the field of vision but, as the following (an)archival collection suggests, vibrate with affective weight and political intent that traverses temporalities, contexts, and practices.

The artistic and performative aptitude of the women’s peace camp and its supporters has been regularly noted across academic and journalistic accounts and is evident in its archival sprawl across personal and public collections, such as the Feminist Library in London, Bradford’s Peace Museum, the Gwyn Kirk papers at MayDay Rooms, and the National Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, to mention but a few.5 The peace camp’s visual activism often reflected on and countered representations in mainstream mass media of the “peace women”, which secured Greenham’s place in British and international Cold War histories, and inspired feminist anti-nuclear mobilisations beyond Britain.

A Common Reclaimed

The site of Greenham Common, a piece of militarised, then reclaimed and partially rewilded common land, pinpoints a specifically British struggle over ownership of and access to land, rooted in the history of land enclosures and clearances.6 As well as its stand against militarism and patriarchy, the peace camp should be understood as a durational practice of trespass and reclamation of a common. Originally designated as such, Greenham Common had been claimed by the Air Ministry as a military training airfield in the early 1940s and was soon after handed over to the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). Despite intervals of disuse after the end of the Second World War, the Ministry of Defence never returned it to the Council for free public use.7 By 1968, the base was formally and indefinitely leased to Britain’s American allies and became known as “USAF” (United States Air Force) Greenham Common, although the acronym “USRAF” has also been informally circulated to highlight the collusion between the British and US air forces in enclosing the site, following the reluctant sale of the land by the Council to the Ministry of Defence in 1951, under threat of a compulsory purchase order.8

In 1979, NATO earmarked Greenham Common as a base for cruise missiles in Europe, a decision that prompted Women for Life on Earth—a group of women, men, and children anti-nuclear activists—to march in protest from Cardiff to the site. The indifference of the British press to the march prompted the idea to set up the peace camp, which soon became women-only and remained a continuous and non-hierarchically organised site of protest for nineteen years (1981–2000).

When the United States and Soviet Union were required by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to eliminate their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles, all missiles were removed from Greenham Common. In 1992, the base was returned to the Ministry of Defence, which no longer had a use for it. In 1997, local authority and business representatives formed the Greenham Common Trust to purchase the former airbase and develop parts of it as a business park. The former airfield was opened to the public in 2000, while the nationally significant woodlands, grasslands, and heathlands of Greenham and Crookham Commons have been managed by the Wildlife Trust since 2014. Based in the business park, the now defunct New Greenham Arts (2000–2017) commissioned and exhibited original artworks that explored the site’s history, including works by Pam Hardman and Richard DeDomenici, who are discussed in this feature.9 In the restored common, the Greenham Common Control Tower reopened as an exhibition and community space in 2018, cementing the site’s character as English heritage with a transnational reach, and continuing to grapple with its long and contested legacies in politics and visual culture.

Anarchival Methodologies and the Virtual Feminist Museum

In a resonant aside to his influential article “An Archival Impulse”, art critic and historian Hal Foster introduced the adjective “anarchival” to capture the specificity of artistic engagement with archives:

archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps “anarchival impulse” is the more appropriate phrase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects—in art and in history alike—that might offer points of departure again.10

The methodological constellation that shapes this “Animating the Archive” feature can be described as “anarchival” for multiple reasons. First, my engagement with the art and visual activism of Greenham Common is “anarchival” in Foster’s sense and inspired by “anarchival” practices:11 it is less concerned with origins than traces and travails of anti-nuclear feminist aesthetics across platforms, media, online and offline archives, practices, and movements, approaching the peace camp as an “incomplete project” that is actively recollected and potentially reactivated over the ebbs and flows of the peace camp’s long history and beyond. I am particularly interested in the anarchive as excess archival energy that troubles the containment of Greenham as a chapter in (art) history, acknowledging it instead as a rhizomatic intersection in both artistic and political terms.

The material presented here is not limited to art and visual activism from Greenham but traces links between the peace camp’s poetics and politics and related imaginaries, from Prunella Clough’s paintings of dilapidated enclosures to the enlisting of a Marshallese woman demon in the service of anticolonial, anti-nuclear feminism. Such links are at times evidence of the peace camp’s influence and, at others, are put forward as visual arguments for its survival by inviting the reader to rethink and resituate Greenham in new contexts. Greenham’s visual culture proffers its own anarchival emblem in the woven webs that protesters deployed in blockades, sit-ins, die-ins, and on the perimeter fence of the airbase.12 The reference to anarchism in the neologism “anarchival” is also pertinent to the peace camp, which Lucy Robinson describes as an instantiation of “the DIY anarcho scene… pull[ing] together music and squat cultures, more formal long-standing anarchist thought and anarcho-informed autonomous community organisation”.13 Finally, there is something both anarchic and anarchival in my methodology, which selectively draws on literature and practices from art history, archive studies, feminist heritage studies, and feminist theory, in a search for resonances and connections towards new disciplinary hybrids.

Viewed through the lens of feminist intergenerational transmission, Greenham Common can be approached as a manifestation of Griselda Pollock’s formulation of the virtual feminist museum.14 Mobilising Aby Warburg’s concept of Nachleben (afterlife/survival by metamorphosis)—her feminist potential was identified by Margaret Iversen in 1993—the virtual feminist museum untethers artefacts, images, and practices from their historical contexts and sets them in motion, tracing their travels, reoccurrences and transformations across time and space.15 In this feature, I present an anarchival curatorial experiment that activates the virtual feminist museum of Greenham Common and feminist anti-nuclear activism more broadly. This virtual museum brings together anti-war, anti-patriarchal “pathos formulae”, or affectively charged tropes and gestures, from care rituals to failing phalluses, and includes the bold and playful détournement of the perimeter fence from its intended function.

Pollock exploits “the museum’s speciality”—the exhibition—to stage new encounters between artefacts, images, and audiences, and taps into their potential for revealing or producing “new critical relations among artworks”.16 My work draws on Pollock’s Warburgian belief in meaningful juxtapositions and transformative encounters, while also evoking Benjamin Buchloh’s observation that, for Warburg, the construction of collective historical memory hinged on “the inextricable link between the mnemonic and the traumatic”.17 Greenham’s anarchive both documents and responds to the trauma of the nuclear arms race that has persisted beyond the end of the Cold War, while bringing together a range of performative strategies of feminist resistance to war and militarised masculinity.

This feature participates in a resurgence of Warburg’s art history in the context of the digital humanities.18 Artworks and documentation of actions cohabitate as images, each with its own history of provenance, publication, circulation, and citation. Aspects of this eloquent metadata, which illuminate the impact, meanings, and activist deployments of historic material, have informed the clusters of images offered here for browsing, contemplation, and interpretation in the virtual Denkraum of British Art Studies.19 Red Chidgey’s formulation of “assemblage memory”—a DIY, flexible, and activist approach to feminist transmission through archival curiosity and engagement—further underlines the feminist potential of Warburg’s approach in the post-digital era, and challenges the assumed criteria for (art-)historical significance: Greenham is important not because it can be proven to have been influential, but because it remains resonant.20

The collaborative practices and communal aspirations of Greenham Common defied the shock and awe tactics of other anti-nuclear organisations, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In the words of Sister Seven, an artist collective that exhibited at Greenham Common:

visual representations in the area of anti-nuclear “propagandising” disquieted us, either because we found them offensive, or limited in their superficial exploitation of fear… Caught in the language of war, specialising in the tactics of shock and attack, such images serve to arouse… helplessness without offering any solution to them.21

Such tactics implied a definitive separation between activist-artists and audiences, which were actively resisted and redressed through the collaborative practices and communal aspirations of Greenham Common. The threat of global annihilation either through nuclear war or imminent environmental destruction was—and continues to be—framed in terms that reproduce some of its destructive violence but do not allow for, let alone promote, strategies of resistance and change. Tactics at Greenham Common, by contrast, offered a range of alternatives to reproducing violence while condemning it. Rather than grappling with the nuclear abject or unthinkable annihilation, the putative representational impasse of the threat of nuclear apocalypse was regularly and diversely overcome through highly effective, nuanced, and crafty grassroots aesthetics.

Nicolson at her word states that anti-nuclear feminist actions are “artforms in themselves”, and present visual activism alongside artworks in mutual dialogue, often drawing and riffing on each other’s activist aesthetic breakthroughs.22 Expanding on Georges Didi-Huberman’s preoccupation with memory and transmission, the virtual museum of Greenham Common supports both linear and non-linear forays into its sprawling network of connections and diffuse collections.23 Here, Warburg’s “iconology of the interval” is invested with a feminist desire for reactivation that traces cultural persistence with an activist agenda. A strategy of selectively harnessing feminist legacies to tackle the challenges of the present moment, reactivation further teases out Warburg’s feminist potential.24 Where Warburg highlights “the dual possibility of tradition, either as an amnesiac repetition of the past or as a memorial construction”, this virtual museum looks for ideological affinities in representational similarities, and invests in the capacity of feminist heritage towards a continued and reinvigorated feminist activism, not only against nuclear armament but for collective planetary survival.25

What follows is a document of tensions between familiar taxonomies and intuitive lines of flight, critical “themes” and pathos formulae, history, and art. Iconic photographs of famous Greenham actions neighbour images from different historical and cultural contexts, not to suggest that one refers to the other, knowingly or unconsciously, but to cultivate anachronistic solidarities and mutual elucidation or, just as usefully, defamiliarisation. More of “a thinking machine” than a heritage project, this virtual museum unfurls the poetics of the anarchic edge of the feminist 1980s across time, over the common and beyond.26

The Perimeter Fence

The perimeter fence of the Greenham Common USAF base was targeted for symbolic and physical interventions. It acted as the screen through which the women and the authorities would look at and talk to each other; as a barrier, whose soundness was challenged through fence-cutting and fence-pulling actions, aimed to highlight the lack of security around weapons of mass destruction; and it became an informal yet permanent visual display, a secular reliquary of precious mementos that acted as reminders of what would be lost in the event of nuclear war (or accident), a grid on which suspended everyday objects were transformed into readymades, and a gallery for original artwork often made with textiles and yarn, which prompted Lynette Edwell and Sally Payen to compare the fence to a loom (figs. 1, 2 and 3).27

The computer game Base Invaders celebrates one of the most widely publicised and ordinarily condemned peace camp actions, of cutting the fence to break into the base (fig. 4). Advertised in 1984 on page three of the special issue “Women for Peace” of Feminist Art News, at the price of £3.00 with proceeds going to Greenham, the game also presented opportunities for promoting computer literacy and training in coding among women (fig. 5). In the same issue of Feminist Art News, Annie Lockwood discusses the “spin-offs” of the game, including converting it from its original PPC format to Ovic, as a coding exercise, and setting up IT courses for women in Newcastle.28 The player in Base Invaders has a simple objective, to bring down as much of the perimeter fence as possible without getting arrested, but they must first select M or F as their gender. If M for male is selected, the following message appears on screen, while the melody of the Greenham song “We are Women” plays in the background: “You are Men/Think You’re Strong/Been Aggressive for Too Long…/ (adapted from a Greenham song)/You’ll Have to press F”.29

As well as being used as a makeshift gallery on the common, the perimeter fence occasionally migrated into formal gallery spaces. Originally created in 1989 during a one-month residency at New York’s New Museum, Margaret Harrison’s installation Common Land Greenham was “a reconstruction and reinterpretation” of the perimeter fence of the Greenham Common base bearing the protesters’ personal and largely domestic additions, including photographs, children’s clothing and toys, and kitchen implements (fig. 6). The installation includes a mural, an empty pram, and a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas: “We can best help you prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.” Harrison’s installation was recreated for her solo exhibition Preoccupy, staged at Silberkuppe, Berlin in 2012, as the gallery curators regarded it, and the original perimeter fence of the base itself, as an influential precedent for the camps of the Occupy movement. In 2013, Harrison showed Common Reflections, a new iteration of her perimeter fence works as the centrepiece of the eponymous exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery, where the inclusion of mirrors evoked the performative action “Reflect the Base” in December 1983 (fig. 7). Reflect the Base was one of the biggest Greenham actions in number of participants (50,000) and resulted in hundreds of arrests (fig. 8). Protestors were instructed to bring portable mirrors from home, while lengths of reflective cellophane sheets were attached to the outside of the fence. According to a promotional poster: “Thousands of women will reclaim Greenham Common… Using mirrors to turn the base inside out the theme will be reflections and reflecting (hold the mirrors one way and the people inside the base see themselves, hold the mirrors the other way and the base disappears). There will be sounds on the hour every hour. Mass gardening all day. Silent vigil. Candlelit vigil”. This action represented an escalation of previous ones, especially its direct precedent “Embrace the Base”, 1982. According to Rebecca Johnson, “Reflect the Base” was “bigger, louder and angrier”.30

It would be apt to frame visits to Greenham as a kind of secular pilgrimage, if pilgrimages are understood as “movements of people that loosen the hold of institutional, structural descriptions in the creation of liminal spaces”.31 By all accounts, spending any amount of time at the camp was personally and politically transformative.32 The peace camp helped map the world anew by making the spatial dimension of military-patriarchal oppression both obvious and concrete, and fostering the development of protest methods that deliberately trespassed against it. In the work of decolonial feminist philosopher, María Lugones, “trespassing… violat[es] the spatiality and logic of oppression”.33 The camp created plentiful opportunities for both enacting and reflecting on border violations as a form of eloquent resistance (fig. 9), from the détournement of the perimeter fence into a protest medium to the successful reclamation of the common as a residential address for protestors, recognised as such in the polling register, despite unsuccessful attempts to challenge it.34

Sounds of Greenham

Greenham’s resonance should be understood both metaphorically, as an enduring and far-reaching feminist legacy, and literally, as a sonic environment.35 Greenham women made the USAF base a noisier place that would not be allowed to “melt into the countryside” and be ignored, as the Conservative government hoped it would.36 Sound was deployed widely and purposefully in Greenham actions to drown out and respond to the noise of military operations, which extended to the surveillance of the protesters by air (see figs. 12 and 13). The rich sonic texture of Greenham was however, defined by song, and Greenham songbooks circulated through the camp and beyond as a means of expanding its networks and influence and preserving its legacy. Women sang together as a means of building and demonstrating solidarity and strength, and used collective improvisation to thrash out their beliefs and strategies. According to Feigenbaum, songs and singing were both an organising tool and key constituent of protest:

“The songs carried information about the camp, describing daily routines, significant actions, political positions and encounters women had with the police, soldiers and media makers. Greenham songs included parodied, reimagined and updated songs from other social movements, as well as new songs that were written by Greenham women, often adapted from protest slogans and women’s poetry.”37

Alanna O’Kelly’s Chant Down Greenham (1984), a series of performances and audio works, includes a sound recording of the action “Sounds Around the Base”, where between 30,000 and 50,000 women made sounds on the hour every hour, in conjunction with the action “Reflect the Base” (fig. 10).38 The artist’s participation in the action, and subsequent related work, resulted in an original addition to Greenham’s songbooks, and proved a turning point for her, personally and professionally: “There I heard a small group of women keening. I was very struck by this. It was moving, powerful. Back in my studio on Gardiner Street, Dublin my work changed. I changed. It became necessary to use my voice and my body.”39

Women’s voices and vocalisations were identified by Greenham’s opposers as a key practice of the peace camp that was disruptive and dangerous. Greenham woman, organiser, and journalist, Lynette Edwell, describes how some editors in the British press sought out photographs of open-mouthed women, which could be misleading: “If you’re being pulled by the policemen, applying pressure points to you, your mouth opens and looks as if you’re shouting whether you are or not” (fig. 11).40 Being vocal and loud was seen as an eloquent manifestation of Greenham’s transgressions of gender propriety and heteronormativity, so much so that photographs of open-mouthed women gained a particular currency in the tabloid economy of shaming.41 While the liberal press leaned on long-established tropes of pacifist maternalism to represent Greenham in a light of middle-class respectability (thereby lending it some form of ill-conceived legitimacy), tabloids amplified its gender nonconformity, queer sexuality, and punk sensibility, in order to condemn the peace camp as a base for dangerous troublemaking, targeting nuclear military infrastructure as well as the nuclear family.

The sound of voices was also transmitted through telephonic networks of communication that were vital to the survival of the camp and the organisation of mass actions. The “tree” in Sally Payen’s painting Invisible Woman and the Telephonic Tree alludes to that system, while the interweaving of wire and yarn conveys the hacking of the fence as a loom (figs. 12 and 13). In addition to “decorating” the fence with handmade signs, banners, knitting, and everyday objects, Greenham women also shook it to produce an uncanny rattling.

Like Payen, Laura Phillips deploys archival research into the histories and documents of feminist movements as an artistic as well as political resource. Fence motifs appear regularly in her work, simultaneously evocative of the materiality of wire fencing and liberated from it, as grid or ground on which figures appear. Working collaboratively and using improvisation, Phillips’ film consists of photograms and 16mm footage developed with readily available, “domestic” and eco-friendly chemicals such as coffee and soda crystals instead of purpose-made developing agents, and responsively accompanies a musical performance using DJ software. In the documentation of Performance with Halftone, a pair of hands “plays” the fence like a harp in an inaudible performance, or rather a performance that is seen but lined with a different soundtrack from live musicians, produced independently but responsively (fig. 14).

In her print You Can’t Kill the Spirit (undated), artist printmaker Pam Hardman incorporated an embossed score for the eponymous Greenham song, which was originally composed in 1975 by Naomi Littlebear Morena and has been used in feminist movements internationally ever since (fig. 15). The score wraps around the base, enveloping the perimeter fence in resonant vestiges that are more tactile than visible.42 “Singing became integrated as both a protest tactic and daily ritual”, and it is this intricate interweaving of the peace camp’s domestic routines and aesthetic activism that Hardman captures in her print, where musical notation replaces barbed wire, just as singing drowned out the noise pollution caused by helicopter surveillance, the traffic of heavy military vehicles, and the destruction of dwellings in the camp following forcible evictions.43

Exploding the Nuclear Family

Greenham both exploited and disrupted the maternalism of women’s activism against war. In her critical and experiential review of global women’s anti-war activism, Cynthia Cockburn offers Greenham as an example of the persistence of maternalism, reflected in the decoration of the perimeter fence with baby clothes and photographs, as well as a space where such maternalism was debated and challenged.44 Cockburn cites Rebecca Johnson, notable Greenham activist and founding president of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), who was herself ambivalent about the nurturing connotations of the action “Embrace the Base” (1982).45 Johnson points out that “Embrace the Base” was part of a two-day programme, with the second day focusing on closing the base down through blockades. The motherly embrace was therefore intended to turn into a smothering, even though this important escalation was ignored by some supporters and many sympathetic reporters, who played up and stereotyped its maternalist features “in a misguided attempt to counteract the adverse publicity”.46 I want to shift the discussion from whether women are “naturally” or can strategically be seen as maternal, and the role that such designations might play in their opposition to war, to consider how the peace camp reimagined the social contexts in which care was given and received, beyond the nuclear family. In art history, maternal caregiving evokes iconographical traditions of immense cultural currency, which are critiqued and reconfigured in feminist theory, art, and visual activism.

Although not taken at Greenham, the undated photograph included here, which shows Babies Against the Bomb activists, acts as a visual and conceptual aid in navigating the knotted intersection of the maternal, pacifism, and feminism (fig. 16). The photograph was used as the sole illustration in Tamar Swade’s contribution to the publication Keeping the Peace, edited by activist, writer, and child psychiatrist, Lynne Jones, where Swade explains that having a baby both interrupted and revitalised her pre-existing commitment to peace.47 The photograph shows three generations of protesters in mutual absorption (nursing and being nursed and in passionate conversation), and absorbed in their work, combining childcare with activist labour. The politics and activist aesthetics of “Babies Against the Bomb” foreshadowed Nancy Fraser’s invitation to untether the work of care from systems of social reproduction that have successfully exploited and co-opted it, and to cast it instead as a genuine feminist alternative to the explicit misogyny and misanthropy of capitalism in its neoliberal inflections.48

Julia Kristeva grappled with similar issues through an art-historical route, approaching art and visual culture as both source material and methodological tools for negotiating the psychosocial meanings of care in its maternal manifestations. Kristeva mobilised the work of two Renaissance masters, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo Da Vinci, to interrogate descriptions and proscriptions of care work and maternal subjectivity through the idealised maternity of the Madonna. Despite its well-documented normative patriarchal limitations, Kristeva found in the idealised and obsessively represented maternal the potential for a woman-to-woman sociality: in becoming mother, one also becomes reconnected with one’s own and joins a society of fellow mother-workers, as well as maternal subjects.49 It is surprising that Kristeva did not hone in on Da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (circa 1503–1519) (fig. 17), which, alongside The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, aka The Burlington House Cartoon (ca. 1499–1500) portrays three generations together: Mary with her own mother Saint Anne, and baby Jesus, with both grown-ups engaged in mothering work. Interestingly, the painting in the Louvre The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne was a key focus in Freud’s speculative and widely disputed case study on the artist, Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910). While a comprehensive critical evaluation of this much-debated body of work falls outside the remit of the present text, my intention is to introduce documentation of feminist anti-nuclear activism into the long-standing and wide-ranging art-historical preoccupation with mother-and-child iconography, of which the Virgin and child is an idealised—and artificially atomised—manifestation, in order to unsettle it and allow a rethinking of its meaning.50 In the slide show of his Three Lectures on Leonardo, Warburg uses St. Anne with the Virgin and Christ Child to transition from “life in motion” represented by the Battle of Anghiari, to “the calmly contemplative figure” of the Madonna and her mother. Juxtaposing Da Vinci’s experiments in “beauteous intimacy” to the photograph of the “Babies Against the Bomb” triad exposes the labour in Mary’s mothering and bestows a feminist dimension to the unresolved dynamism of the cartoon: the bodies of the two women do not reproduce or mirror each other but converse—and possibly strategise.51

The disparate scales of the private and the public, the sacred and the profane, kaleidoscopically shift and meld into one another. Shirley Cameron and Evelyn Silver’s performances The Virgin Mary Society (circa 1983) did not merely satirise the conservative edge of pacifist maternalism, but also exposed the problem of the nuclear family ideal as one of scale: a doubled Virgin Mary is no longer the vehicle of patriarchal femininity but a more ambiguous figure of woman-to-woman sociality. Cameron and Silver’s performances from this period often highjacked rituals of social reproduction and heteronormativity: I Married Charles—You Can Too (1981) from the year of the globally televised wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, evolved into Brides Against the Bomb (1982–1986), which was performed at the Glastonbury Festival and the Greenham Common peace camp, among other unconventional contexts (fig. 18). In that performance, the fallacy of nuclear deterrence (the bomb as protector) was transposed onto the married couple (the husband as protector) to reveal its treacherous absurdity. Even when departing from Christian doctrine, evocations of the Virgin Mary in feminist art practices of this time could be approached as examples of a feminist Marianism.52 In Jacqueline Morreau’s painting If Mary Came to Greenham, we see that hypothetical culminate in her arrest (fig. 19). Mary’s gesture is significant: it resembles the traditional benediction in which the thumb, index, and middle finger are held together pointing upwards to the sky. Drawing on pre-Christian palmistry, the thumb is said to represent the planet Venus and, by extension, the (holy) feminine; the middle finger Saturn or Chronos, the creator of the Titans in Greek mythology, represents the father; and the index finger stands for Saturn’s son Jupiter, and represents the son. The three fingers are normally held together in unity for the holy nuclear family, but not so in Morreau’s painting. At the moment of her arrest, this Mary sticks her thumb out.

The holy family is mirrored and modernised in another idealisation, the young royal family of the United Kingdom. In 2016, government documents from 1983 were released to the National Archives in Kew, London, revealing that Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary Bernard Ingham circulated a list of suggestions for distracting the public’s attention from the Easter Monday anti-nuclear march in London on 4 April 1983, including flooding the press with pictures of Prince William, then aged ten months and on his first visit to Australia and New Zealand. The photos were indeed widely published and still enjoy a vibrant digital afterlife, in their original form and also as source material for royal memorabilia, and are recirculated anew on the occasion of each subsequent royal birth (fig. 20). Although children were ever-present in the camp, the practice of care became liberated from idealised visualisations of childcare for the sake of self-preservation and peer solidarity: the parked or repurposed pram resists its sentimental associations to become an emblem of de-nuclearised care (fig. 21). In a series of sculptural installations by Roxane Permar, titled The Nuclear Family (1984–1990), that construct is subject to a different kind of attack: garment reliquaries in different sizes and arrangements are varyingly damaged or destroyed, plastered or bloodied (fig. 22). Strongly evocative of the collections of clothing worn by people killed or injured in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Permar offers material reminders of the disavowed realities of nuclear weapons.53

Births can become a form of unwitting protest in the flesh when they provide evidence of the damage that nuclear weapons inflict, even outside of combat. In a video poem performed on the Runit Dome—an islet of the Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean that was completely incinerated after nine US nuclear tests—poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner revisits the Marshallese mythical figure of Mejenkwaad, a woman demon known to eat babies and pregnant women (fig. 23). In Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Monster”, Mejenkwaad is not exactly rehabilitated but becomes a justifiably gruesome vehicle for exploring the localised historical trauma of birth defects caused by nuclear testing, and the global pain of post-partum depression.54 After all, any attachment to futurity is conditional on one’s quality of life, which is itself subject to the violence of global and local inequalities. In her speech at a San Francisco rally in 1982, Alice Walker anticipates intersectional critiques of feminist anti-nuclear movements and recognises that universal perils do not generate universal responses, as she turns to Zora Neale Hurston’s curse prayer from the 1920s.55 While admiring and sympathising with the sharpness and precision of Hurston’s anger, Walker declares herself committed to life, with conditions:

And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let white men continue to subjugate it, and continue their lust to dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention, leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything else they can reach. […] But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything is alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.56

Violence and Resistance

In advance of the 1982 “Embrace the Base” action at Greenham Common, a set of guidelines was circulated, ending with the following admonition:

Especially, we will not verbally abuse those police officers, messengers and office workers who have few options in choosing their occupations, due to the economic realities of sex, race and class in this country. We will not direct our fury, which the generals—the destroyers of life—deserve, against our sisters and brothers who suffer this destruction.57

While capturing Greenham’s commitment to non-violence, the statement also betrays some of the ways in which many Greenham women relied on white, middle-class privilege, particularly in their attitude to the police, and put that privilege to work in their protest. Rebecca Mordan—co-founder of Greenham Women Everywhere, an oral history and exhibition project for the promotion of the peace camp’s legacies—was at Greenham as a child, with her mother Marie Knowles. Morgan discusses the “jedi-mind-tricks” that her mother learned at Greenham to break down barriers between women protestors and the police, which made it more difficult for the male officers to be violent.58 While evidencing the extent and usefulness of self-education at the camp, such observations also highlight the serious discrepancies in the treatment of different constituencies by the authorities, also noted by Amanda Hassan many years earlier in 1984.59 Contemporary environmental movements such as Extinction Rebellion (XR), which has been compared to the Greenham Common peace camp, have been criticised for similar intersectional shortcomings and specifically middle-class and white privilege.60 Greenham women, nevertheless, young queer women in particular, were far from immune to violence from locals and the authorities. Such violence was predictably under-reported in mainstream media but condemned in Greenham’s own alternative news publications and captured in its grassroots visual media: in the near absence of photographic documentation of police brutality, artworks such as Daphne Morgan’s appliques, discussed here, make visible the violence that news reporters missed or ignored.

Beneficiaries of the questionable merits of white female privilege enlisted it to the cause of disarmament, often also tapping into maternal authority. In the words of John Skare, security policeman for the American military, “there was one instance when I was walking the perimeter and a woman said to me through the fence, ‘Why do you want to kill my children?’ I told her I was just doing my job, but I always remember that”.61 The obvious truth that nuclear war would be non-discriminating in its devastation elevated conversations between protestors and non-protestors—from military personnel and police to passers-by and workers on the base—to a significant activist tactic. Greenham women made signs saying: “Can you stop for a talk?” and organised training in how to conduct such conversations. Their protest largely relied on the conventions and protections of civil society and, despite Minister of Defence Michael Heseltine’s assurances to parliament in 1983 that women found by the nuclear missile silos would be shot if necessary, the only known fatality of a protestor by police was of Helen Thomas, who was run over and killed by a police horse box.

There was police brutality at the peace camp, often unobserved by the media, and violence from local groups with and without fascist affiliations (such as with the National Front). Additionally, there was the shock of incarceration, which many women experienced by refusing to pay fines for breaking by-laws. Textile artist Daphne Morgan made a series of embroidered and appliqued scenes from the peace camp, including Melting into the Countryside, 1984–1990, which shows instances of excessive force, rarely captured by photographers but regularly reported by survivors, including a woman being dragged by her hair at bottom left (fig. 24).62 The perpetual spectacle of force is couched in the central panel of Janis Jefferies’ Home of the Brave? (1986) in the form of a police patrol with a dog, layered with images from the peace camp (fig. 25). The lace border stands in contrast with the patrol but also evokes wire fences and enclosures, just as Jenny Matthews’ red stitching simultaneously domesticates and intensifies the violence of Rebecca Johnson’s arrest (fig. 26).

In Keith Piper’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1984), police brutality and the threat of nuclear war are connected to Britain’s domestic politics and international alliances (fig. 27). Greenham Common, first-strike tactics, and nuclear apocalypse are referenced in the third panel, while the second touches on police violence against striking miners in the north of England, and the fourth bears the unmistakable resemblance of US President Ronald Reagan as a horseman with his finger on the nuclear button. In the short, Ironing to Greenham, one among a series of thirteen one-minute films commissioned from Lis Rhodes and Jo Davis by Channel 4, the relationship between force and power comes to the fore—illuminating how the former often betrays an absence of the latter (fig. 28).63 A hot iron hisses with menace as it passes over a lace-trimmed cloth, resembling Janis Jefferies’ Home of the Brave: the words of anti-fascist feminist philosopher Hannah Arendt appear on the cloth, as if embroidered: “Violence can always destroy power; out of a barrel of a gun grows the most effective command resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power”.64

Thalia Campbell, an experienced banner maker, helped set up the peace camp and coordinated collaborative new works made at and about the camp. She also (controversially at the time) documented these works in postcards for sale, some of which are included in virtually every archive of Greenham Common.65 Remembrance is Not Enough (1981) is among her most widely circulated works: the banner was carried between the Cenotaph on Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, London, on Remembrance Sunday in 1981, an annual commemoration which rarely accommodates anti-war voices (fig. 29). Another banner, Thatcher’s Thugs Orgreave 1984 (circa 1985–1989) does not reference Greenham directly but highlights the interconnectivity between the peace camp and other nodes of resistance, including the miners’ strike, which Greenham women actively supported (fig. 30).

Chila Kumari Burman’s series of six prints, Riot Series (1981–1982) also cast nuclear disarmament and urban uprisings against the racial and class politics of the Thatcher government as interrelated struggles (figs. 31 and 32). Tear gas and warfare, police brutality, and toxic militarism become intertwined through the deployment of repeated motifs, including gas masks. Showing police officers in gas masks, Three Mug Shots in a Row is a triptych squared: each plate contains three poses and is printed three times, after being subjected to acid baths of varying duration. Discussing a related work in the series, Lynda Nead argued that “the materials and techniques themselves attack the paradigmatic symbol of imperial authority”.66 In Three Mug Shots, the acid treatment to which the uniformed police sergeant in the gas mask is subjected, evokes resistance—fighting back—but also a glimpse of what would happen to them in the event of a nuclear strike. Nuclear annihilation is the true if terrible equaliser: the sergeant poses in front view and side view, following the conventions of photographic records of suspects made by police upon arrest. The third pose follows a different register: the sergeant becomes a suspect but also a mug (in the British colloquial meaning of a fool) holding their hands up in pointless surrender.

Fragile Borders and Breached Enclosures

The women’s peace camp at Greenham Common was organised as a string of encampments around the gates to the airbase: these smaller camps, whose number varied over the years, were originally given descriptive names (such as Music Gate, Artists’ Gate, New Age Gate) but were renamed within the first year of the camp’s existence after the colours of the rainbow, with each representing a different constituency and approach to Greenham’s cause.67 The new names stuck and were soon used not only by the women but also by journalists and even Ministry of Defence police.67 Where new encampments were added between established gates, they would be named after colours composed from those of adjacent gates, in accordance with the colour wheel, for example, the gate between Green and Turquoise became Emerald, while the one between the old Indigo and Violet gates was Woad.67 This is one of the many ways in which visual aesthetics organised the camp, rather than being merely one of its manifestations.

Gates were the main but not only points of communication between the inside and the outside of the base, due to the obvious porousness of the perimeter fence. Gates were also deliberately undermined through actions that highlighted the fragility of the base’s borders and the impotence of military security, even around its most precious and dangerous assets: fences were regularly breached, and performative first strikes were launched using balloons and handcrafted failing phalluses. A photomontage by Loraine Leeson, commissioned for the exhibition A Peace of the Action at Camerawork in 1983, splices photographs from Greenham by members of the Format Photographers Agency (fig. 33).70 In Leeson’s photomontage, trespass occurs many times, including, in the background, by an elderly woman in a raincoat climbing over the fence—who was collaged from an iconic photograph taken by Maggie Murray on New Year’s Day of 1983—and in the foreground, brimming from a textured black hole in the perimeter. Still, gates remained points of continuous protest and concentrated action, where those going in or out of the base would inevitably slow down and stop, and where protesters became less easy to ignore. When symbolic objects, such as a child-sized coffin with the inscription “human race”, were delivered to a gate, they created valuable photo opportunities as the authorities reacted to their presence and often carried them into the base, following protocols that were soon revised (figs. 34 and 35).71

The iconography of gates and fences at Greenham skirts other artistic traditions of landscape art. Prunella Clough’s “urbscapes”, a neologism that she coined to describe her painterly approach to English landscape in the aftermath of the Second World War and then deindustrialisation, have been interpreted in terms of both the formative experience of war and the “physical and psychological topography of the Cold War”.72 Roughly twenty years later, photographer John Kippin set out to document the changing landscape of the common at the time of the peace camp’s final closure, creating a record of absences and barely there traces, vibrant with affect (fig. 36). Mark Durden contextualises Kippin’s Greenham series in the photographer’s simultaneously elegiac and historical materialist exploration of deindustrialisation, and his resistance to the Thatcherite co-option of landscape into commodified notions of neo-nationalist heritage.73 Kippin’s preoccupation with restoration could be interpreted as the polar opposite to Clough’s keen if obtuse observation of post-industrial debris. The tone of Kippin’s photographs, which for Durden evokes Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugene Atget’s photographs as “empty like the scene of a crime”, marks them as melancholic and nostalgic agents of “surrogate memory, focusing on a particular reflection of time and place within a period of healing and letting go”, while Clough finds enigmatic beauty in the ruins of the built environment.74 Rather than a celebration of entropy, however, Clough’s Broken Gates (fig. 37), painted a year into the establishment of the peace camp and placed in this company of images, acquires new aesthetic and political potential: it becomes enlisted to Greenham’s anarcho-feminist defiance of fences, enclosures, and borders, and possibly shares its commitment to the reclamation of the commons (fig. 38).

Goose and Common 

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

 

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who takes things that are yours and mine.

 

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law.

 

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back.

 

[17^th c. English rhyme. Lyrics and variations: https://unionsong.com/u765.html Some verses appear in the episode ‘Goose and Common’ of Hang on a Minute (Channel 4, 1983) by Lis Rhodes and Joanna Davis, as well as in Margaret Harrison’s Common Land/Greenham (1989)]

Spiders and Webs

Spider webs proliferated at Greenham Common, both in and around the peace camp and circulated as one of its unofficial logos via its visual and material activist culture (figs. 39 and 40). The web was deployed as a symbol but was far more than that. The most potent manifestation of Greenham’s “material literacy”, namely, a knowing, collaborative, and radical experimentation with matter, it was immediately noted and praised by Marina Warner among others.75 When used on the fence or over protesters in sit-ins and die-ins, untangling the web made surprisingly hard work for the police and military authorities faced with the task of removing it, and reduced them to “the fiddly task of the kind women are traditionally required to do” (figs. 42 and 43).76

The web constitutes a nodal point of symbolic density, visual impact, practicality, and activist efficacy. Used earlier in 1980 in the USA by the Women’s Pentagon Action, where webs blocked the entrances to the Pentagon, their making stood for “acts of empowerment, defiance and love”, tireless resilience , feminist reclamations of witchcraft, and recognition of spiders as powerful and stealthy but underestimated predators (fig. 44).77 Having observed that the items often fastened to the perimeter fence by women protestors (such as toys, baby clothes, or even an egg) were purposefully incongruous with military might, Guy Brett described the woollen webs as “a brilliant realisation of the weakness-strength metaphor”:

“[T]hey don’t meet force with force, but with a subtle psychic riposte which is essentially sculptural and visual. For the women: threads linking one person to another, linking bodies to the land, both spreading out and protecting, gathering to a centre. For the authorities: an embarrassment to brute force, cobweb messiness, the disturbance of clean demarcations between properties, functions, responsibilities.”78

As well as a powerful visual and material strategy with rich symbolic and connotative power, the making of the webs lent itself to collaborative group work that required no prior skill or training. Webs became code for the ever-expanding web of Greenham women, their peers and supporters across Britain and the world, while also bringing them together in the act of making, and helping pass the time in police holding cells and prison.

La Ragnatella, meaning “spider web”, was the name of a Sicilian peace camp in Comiso that was short-lived but internationally significant and particularly formative for Greenham women (fig. 45).79 In March 1983, women from Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, and across central and Western Europe organised a week of non-violent actions, including street theatre and blockades, widely publicised at Greenham and supported by Greenham women.80 These actions promoted the visibility of disarmament activism in Comiso but were met with levels of police violence that were unexpected by many visitors, resulting in dozens of arrests and deportations of all foreigners, and arguably precipitating the complete destruction and closure of the peace camp. In the Comiso badge, the graphic condenses the symbol for the planet Venus, widely adopted by women’s liberation movements since the late 1960s, with a crescent moon, another symbol of femininity and cyclical time, and the spider web, a visualisation of the peace camp’s name and symbol of transnational networks for nuclear disarmament and against militarism and American imperialism (figs. 46 and 47).

In Our Hands

Based on two lectures delivered in Edinburgh in October 1980 by Dr Helen Caldicott, chairperson of Physicians for Social Responsibility, VHS tapes of Critical Mass (Edinburgh College of Art, 1980) were widely used as a self-education and anti-nuclear campaigning tool, and cited as instrumental in the founding of the group Babies Against the Bomb. Caldicott’s ideal combination of undeniable scientific expertise and rhetorical prowess goes some way in explaining the impact of her talks: “We are the curators of every organism on this earth. We hold it in the palm of our hands, and this is the ultimate in preventative medicine: to eliminate every single nuclear weapon on earth, and close the reactors at once. For if we do not, we are participating in our own suicide”.81

The visual motif of hands and handprints appears with noticeable regularity in the art and visual culture of nuclear disarmament and anti-nuclear movements within and beyond woman-dominated groups, restoring a metaphorical turn of phrase to its literal meaning through visual representation. Hands are held out in prohibition and reach out for connection; they evoke the care of curatorship, the power of self-determination, and the responsibility that comes with its acknowledgement (figs. 48 and 49). Assuming personal responsibility for the nuclear arms race and the prevention of nuclear war is essential to taking action, across psychoanalytic and activist approaches.82 Handprints convey individual identity and, indexically, unmediated presence. By synecdoche, the proximity and touching of different hands make an immediately recognisable and impactful visual shorthand of togetherness, solidarity, and common purpose. At Greenham, holding hands between friends and lovers became a public declaration of feminist friendship, queer sexuality, and their sometimes blurred boundaries, while the formation of human chains and circles contributed to some of the most iconic Greenham actions, such as a circle dance on top of the silos in the early hours of 1 January 1983, which was photographed by Raissa Page and Pam Isherwood, among many others (fig. 50). Conversely, hands that reach out, grasp, and wrench tap into established iconographies of human suffering, the witnessing of which is intended to create in the viewers an obligation to act. In his series Unwords (1996), Peter Kennard pays homage to John Heartfield’s iconic anti-fascist poster The Hand Has Five Fingers (1928): here, weary hands flicker between strength and impotence as they grasp on or tear at documents that have the power to decide their fate, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to oil price charts (fig. 51).

Tina Keane’s 38-minute video In Our Hands, Greenham (1984) consists of a sound collage of interviews with Greenham women, songs and noise, set against an intermixing of two kinds of footage, from the peace camp and from what could be a nature documentary (figs. 52 and 53). The two scenes cohabit and mingle through the silhouette of a woman’s mobile hands: in the background, there are scenes from the life of spiders, including web-making and mating; in her hands—which open, form fists, and sometimes mimic the movement of spiders—there is Greenham. Keane’s installation notes specify that the video should be shown simultaneously on twelve monitors placed on a free-standing grid in a “wire fence pattern”, and for the grid to be angled in a way that gives the impression of a blockade, with red and blue spotlights in between the monitors suggestive of police presence. Made while the peace camp was at its peak and actively recruiting protestors and supporters, In Our Hands, Greenham casts the camp as a vibrant lab for resistance and change as well as an exciting place of collective joy, where risk is not only outweighed by womanpower but also acknowledged as part of life. The hands belong to artist Sandra Lahire, whose own work explored nuclearity from the perspective of the production of nuclear energy and its fallout, and who was also Keane’s partner at the time, arguably foregrounding the sensual dimension of her movements.

Greenham as Heritage

The women’s peace camp at Greenham Common closed nearly a decade after the last missiles had been removed and the base was shut down. In her correspondence, Yellow Gate veteran Sarah Hipperson explains that the continuation of the camp beyond the closure of the airbase served different purposes: it supported other peace camps; it campaigned for the restoration of the common; and, most importantly, it helped create the infrastructure for the preservation of its legacy.83 Although no monuments to Greenham in all its diversity exist, Thalia Campbell commissioned a life-size statue of a protestor and child from the sculptor Anton Agius as a tribute to Women for Life on Earth, the group that marched from Cardiff to Greenham in August/September 1981, and was installed in Cardiff City Hall in 2003 (figs. 54 and 55). On site, a Peace Garden includes a memorial to Helen Thomas, a woman who was run over by a police horse box, and sculptures by Michael Marriott, representing natural elements and the land’s capacity for regeneration (fig. 56).

Artists like Nina Wakeford and Richard DeDomenici propose entirely different artistic avenues to the preservation of Greenham’s legacies: they make iterative live art of shared remembering that is demanding, labour intensive, and fundamentally co-produced (figs. 57 and 58). Since 2008, Richard DeDomenici has made a series of works in video and performance, spurred by a commission from Helen Cole for New Greenham Arts, which included a residency at the airbase. In his videos, DeDomenici reflects on his experience of visiting the peace camp as a child with his mother, Jessica Richardson, splicing together Richardson’s Super-8 films of the camp with footage he shot himself during his artist residency, using the selfsame camera. One of his films shows the artist in a bright yellow Selk’bag, chosen to keep him warm in his residency but also resembling hazmat suits and Greenham women’s sleeping bags, digging for the wreckage of a plane reportedly carrying nuclear weapons which caught fire at Greenham in 1959, and playing crazy golf with a policeman, inspired by the arrow markings and holes in the floor of the preserved decontamination chambers.84 This film is projected in his cabaret performance set to another pop song, Nena’s Cold War anthem 99 Red Balloons (1984) (fig. 59). At the beginning of the performance, DeDomenici releases ninety-nine red balloons to the audience, inviting them to inhale helium and sing along in high voices that sound almost childlike (fig. 60). Cold War childhood with all its traumas is no longer the object of memory but an eerie re-enactment by a chorus of intoxicated children. The Selk’bag is practical in function and evocative in appearance, while also giving the artist a hefty silhouette as he wonders through the gorse on the common in the videos. It is reminiscent of Lucy Orta’s series of Refuge Wear (1996–2007) and also of another character from pop culture, Laa-Laa of the Teletubbies, a non-verbal cyborg with a monitor embedded in their abdomen who lives in a bunker on some green and pleasant land (fig. 61). Selk’bags are not made for cabaret performances in hot clubs. In a 2008 performance at Duckie, when Amy Lamé, co-founder of Duckie and regular MC, invites DeDomenici to take a bow, the crowd chants “off, off, off” until the artist concedes and begins to remove his Selk’bag. This final act of self-exposure breaks the spell of the Cold War children’s chorus: DeDomenici is all grown up and we have, somehow, survived.

Nina Wakeford “begins with the unfinished business of past social movements, and the challenges of revisiting the energies that these movements created”. Her works often “involve singing as a way of attaching herself to objects or images”.85 Conversing with existing memorialisations of the peace camp and the scholarship of Sasha Roseneil, who is also her partner in life, Wakeford sourced thousands of images, archival photographs of the camp and new ones of forget-me-nots from the nearby memorial Peace Garden. According to Susanne Clausen, in the 2019 Greenham Control Tower iteration of this Greenham-inspired project, “the flowers and the words of the women are broadcast across the landscape where previously the women themselves were surveyed”.86 Wakeford combines singing with speech of a markedly different rhythm: she recites lists, such as Appendix 1 from Roseneil’s Disarming Patriarchy, which captures a variety of data from her Greenham women interviewees including, crucially, sexual orientation before and after engaging with the peace camp. In Wakeford’s performance, tabloid hysteria about the conversion of straight women to lesbianism is tauntingly rendered as sociological data, feminist legacy, and a moving celebration.

The first draft of this feature was written during a mid-career fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre, while substantial revisions benefited from a research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful to the peer reviewers and editors of British Art Studies for their constructive engagement with my work, to Dr Alice Correia for her research into the Greenham Women Everywhere interview archive, and to colleagues, archivists, and artists, for their generosity and expertise.