Woman Breathing

Nancy Speros Woman Breathing from 1978 is a hand printing in blue ink on pieced cream wove paper that exemplifies the artists development of a visual language based on the repeated female figure, a language that she used to confront the patriarchal systems of representation that had excluded women from the history of art. Spero, who spent the early 1970s creating her Codex Artaud, a series of hand-printed works on paper that combined texts by Antonin Artaud with images of female figures, developed a technique of hand printing that allowed her to produce works on paper with the speed and urgency of political broadsheets rather than the preciousness of limited editions. The title Woman Breathing makes the act of respiration into a figure of female existence itself, asserting that the most fundamental biological process of breathing is a political act in a culture that has historically denied womens right to exist on their own terms. The blue ink, which Spero used throughout her career as a reference to the blue of cyanotype prints and ancient Egyptian funerary art, gives the figure the quality of a trace or a memory rather than a fully realized image, suggesting that the woman represented is simultaneously present and absent, visible and erased. The pieced paper, in which separate sheets are combined to create a single composition, reflects Speros practice of working on long horizontal scrolls of paper that could be extended indefinitely, like a roll of film or a continuous narrative.

Speros hand-printed works on paper are foundational works in the history of feminist art, demonstrating that printmaking could be a medium of political urgency rather than aesthetic refinement. Woman Breathing influenced the development of feminist printmaking and the broader tradition of art that confronts patriarchal systems of representation.

A 1978 hand printing in blue ink on pieced paper by Spero, making female breathing a figure of existence and political assertion using the rapid hand-printing technique and extended scroll format she developed for feminist confrontation with patriarchal representation.