Moderator – Naomi Polonsky, Assistant Curator, The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College:
Naomi Polonsky is a curator and art writer. She is currently Assistant Curator at the New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Having graduated from the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has worked at a number of museums and galleries including Tate Modern, Kettle’s Yard and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. She has written on modern and contemporary art for publications including The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Hyperallergic and Artsy, and has presented in conferences at Kettle’s Yard, Tate St Ives and the New Art Gallery, Walsall.

Panel- Sophie Marie Niang, PHD Candidate, University of Cambridge:
Sophie Marie Niang is a Black feminist writer and researcher whose work focuses on blackness in Europe, worldmaking and futurity. She is currently an ESRC-funded PhD student in Sociology at the university of Cambridge, and the features editor of Bad Form, a literary review by and for Black, Asian and other racialised community writers. While she was an undergraduate student at Murray Edwards college, she volunteered with the art collection.

Claudia Clare, Artist:
Claudia Clare trained as a painter at Camberwell School of Art in the 1980s, followed by an apprenticeship with Winchcombe pottery in 1990. She became a regular contributor to Ceramic Review in 1997 and completed a Phd at University of Westminster in 2007. She has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums nationally and was shortlisted for the British Ceramics Biennial Major Award in 2013. In 2019 a major project with women@thewell prompted a growing interest in social and performance collaborations with feminist and community organisations including Filia International Feminist Conference. She is the author of ‘Subversive Ceramics,’ (Bloomsbury 2016) and co-wrote ‘The Pot Book’ (Phaidon, 2011) with Edmund de Waal.

Ann Jones, Curator, Arts Council Collection :

Ann Jones is a curator at the Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre where she has curated numerous touring exhibitions and worked in partnership with museums and galleries across the country. She previously worked at Hayward Touring and Tate and has also worked on freelance projects with galleries in Wales. She is a member of the Advisory Panel for National Museum Wales. She lived in Cambridge in the early 1990s and was instrumental in establishing the New Hall collection of women’s art.

Marcelle Hanselaar :

Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Growing up in the formal atmosphere of a protestant, post war country, proved, thanks to her drop-out/turn-on rebellion, a profound source of inspiration for the recurring subject matter in Hanselaar’s work; namely the fierce and sometimes troubled cohabitation with those raw desires, secret fantasies and uncultivated instincts with our functioning in civil society.
Although she studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, her lust for adventure, guided by a quest for self-discovery, led her to years of wandering, until, in the early 80’s she settled down in her studio in London where she still lives. Self-taught, she started out as an abstract painter before turning to figuration.
As an artist Hanselaar looks for ways to express those illusive questions of who and what we are when the mask is off, and how we appear when the mask is on. The shock effect of her work lies in the contrast of combining her outspoken subject matter through the conventional medium of oil painting or etching. Both her paintings and her prints display her delight and fascination with theatrical illusions and although often peppered with a biting sense of humour, the works reveal her own vibrant understanding of human nature, in all its animosity and fragility.