We Want

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

We Want, a digital print and screen-print by Ashley Cook, was produced at Glasgow Print Studio. Its imagery is inspired by the illustrations from the card game ‘PANKO’ or ‘Votes for Women’ that was originally designed in 1909 by Edward Tennyson Reed, a well-known cartoonist for Punch magazine. Seeing the designs held in the Suffragette collection at the Glasgow Women’s Library, Cook was inspired specifically by the quote ‘We want what men have, it may not be a lot but we want it just the same’, from a Suffragette postcard that incorporated imagery from the PANKO game.

The central image in this print is based on a photograph that Cook took of the artist Janie Nicoll in 1996 for a series of screenprints called It Ain’t Easy To Keep The One You Love Satisfied. With this she combines an image of Lady Justice, the figure of a blindfolded woman holding a sword and a set of scales, symbolising justice; with other motifs such as butterflies, birds and flowers that suggest a paradise-like, utopian ideal. In the background of the print is the hand-written line ‘We want what men have got, it might not be a lot but we want it just the same.’ Repeated like a mantra, these words underpin the endurance and determination of the fight for women’s equality. 

This work is one of 21 prints commissioned in 2012 by the Glasgow Women’s Library to mark the library’s 21st anniversary.

Ashley Cook studied fine art and printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art. After graduating in 1987, she worked there as a print technician and then as a lecturer until 1995. Creating narrative works from found images and her own autographic and photographic images, Cook reuses, redevelops and manipulates iconography in her practice. She uses an intense palette of contrasting colours to create dreamlike, often ethereal images. Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Scottish Arts Council; the BBC; and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow; and internationally at The Vaasa Museum, Finland, and Galeria Otra Vez, Los Angeles.

Places

Subjects

postcard, games, cards, suffrage, suffragette, card, vote

Materials & Techniques

print (as object name), screenprint, digital print

Artist

Ashley Cook (1964 - )

Title

We Want

Edition

Number 10 in an edition of 20

Date

2012

Medium

Digital Print and screenprint

Dimensions

height: 47.6 cm; width: 47.6 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Glasgow Women's Library, with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, March 2020

Inscription

recto: signed 'Ashley Cook', bottom right / 'We Want', bottom centre / '10/20', lower left

Provenance

Glasgow Women's Library, Glasgow, UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection

GAC number

18879