I Also Fight Windmills
Photographic series, 2016–2021
Photography, performance, sound
A woman stands at a window, half-hidden in a curtain that could be a shroud. Another sits facing away, wrists crossed behind her back as if bound, though nothing is holding them. These staged, black-and-white images are Ready's way of inhabiting the inner life of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872–1925) – a trilingual modernist writer who died in a British asylum, and who survives in history only as a footnote to her partner, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
About the Work
Gaudier-Brzeska's unpublished novel, Hysterical Women, follows a migrant heroine from Austria-Hungary who travels through Paris, New York and London chasing a writer's life. Poverty, patriarchal constraint and the wartime death of her partner erode her ambition into what the period called hysteria – read here not as illness but as the body's protest against a life with no other outlet.
Working across the US and Europe, Ready directs others, and at times herself, as the heroines of Sophie's writing, staging their unravelling through gesture, costume and light; images that move between stillness and blur, interior confinement and open landscape.
“I used the performative aspect of hysteria to speak for talented but unfulfilled women, for whom madness was the only way out of a miserable life.”
Audio
In exhibition, the photographs are paired with audio recordings of Sophie's own texts, performed by voice actors, so viewers encounter her words and Ready's images at once.
Details
Archival pigment prints on Permajet Fine Art Silk paper
84 × 59 cm (A1), edition of 3 + 2 AP
59 × 42 cm (A2), edition of 5 + 2 AP
42 × 30 cm (A3), edition of 7 + 2 AP
30 × 21 cm (A4), edition of 9 + 2 AP
Full catalogue available on request.
Solo Exhibitions
State Museum of Grudziądz, Poland, 2024/2025
Film Centre Gallery, Gdynia, Poland, 2024
ronapainting gallery, Photo Oxford Festival, UK, 2023
INTERPHOTO Photography Festival, Poland, 2021
Selected Group Exhibitions
Tribute to Sophie, Hundred Heroines Museum, Nailsworth, UK, 2025
We Also Fight Windmills, Berwick upon Tweed, UK, 2025
Performing the Photobook, FORMAT Festival, Derby, UK, 2023
Women on Women II, ronapainting gallery, Oxford, UK, 2022
A Room of Her Own, Irving Contemporary Gallery, Oxford, UK, 2022
Selected Responses
"Masterly shot and printed, mesmerising images."
Rodrigo Orrantia, art historian and curator
"What an immersive and fabulous experience of an exhibition, a truly great body of work."
Laura Noble, curator and artist"Slow paced and thoughtful, lovely silence to the exhibition."
Alex Schneidermann, artistic director, Photo Oxford
Project PDF
Artist Photobook
The project also culminated in a signed and numbered artist book, published by VIKA Books in 2023.
Photography Credits
All photographs: Ania Ready
