As a woman, my experience of walking differs from that of a man. Why? Because I/we have more to consider: personal safety being one. When walking home from a night out with girlfriends, we will text each other to check we are all home safely, when planning a long walk I am aware of where the more isolated areas are, of ensuring my phone is charged, of letting a friend or sibling know where I am going for the day. Has anything ever happened to me? No. But that heightened awareness makes my experience of walking different from that of a man walking. Advice in women’s running magazines suggests that as a woman running, I might be safer running with a group, to run in the daylight, to not wear my hair in a plait or bunch at the back of my head (it is easier for a perpetrator to grab hair tied up from behind). All this advice collides with how and where I want to run, and where and how I do run.

 ‘Be careful’. ‘Take care’. ‘Text me when you’re home’. ‘Are you sure you are ok to walk on your own?’ ‘Are you walking with your husband?’ ‘Join a group’. These are questions/ statements I hear often in relation to walks and runs, yet am aware these are asked/shared because I am a woman. I find myself asking myself the same questions.

Is long distance walking and running, or even short daily constitutionals just a male domain? No of course not. Yet I feel that, as with so many things in life, women must take on board an extra layer of self-awareness, of responsibility.

Mixing and layering traditional gesso, and sourcing pigments (some local to Cornwall), grinding and blending, cracking eggs and adding white wine and clove oil, feels like a domestic task in my studio. It is a practical task, yet also enables me to connect better with my ground, with my paint, with my materials, a time to think before the painting starts. Squeezing paint from a tube now feels disconnected, however convenient it may be. Artists during medieval and Renaissance times used egg tempera before it was superseded by oil paint.  Reading around that period in time, I question if the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ was in fact enlightened at all: women cast out of their communities as witches for sourcing natural remedies, for mixing their own ‘lotions and potions’, for being older, alone. A gender and class driven mass genocide. Whilst the male dominated art studios of the time also sourced natural pigment colours to paint with, mixed and explored within the safety of their own gender. Although the Italian Renaissance has been held up as a yard stick, a standard and aspiration of skill, our view of it is changing, along with our awareness of the historical traditional exclusions that have resulted in a gender biased history of art.