Ania Ready

I Also Fight Windmills is a photographic series by Polish-British artist Ania Ready, inspired by literary texts written by the modernist, trilingual and largely forgotten author of Polish origin Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872-1925) who died in a mental asylum in the UK. Ready visually reimagines Sophie’s story of a migrant woman from Eastern Europe who travels west to Paris, New York and London to find employment, and more importantly to fulfill her creative ambitions of becoming a writer. The rigid rules of the old societal order, lack of opportunities for women, poverty and disillusionment lead to her mental instability. The heaviest blow comes with the loss of her partner – the modernist French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – in the First World War soon after she sent him a rather mean-spirited letter.

The works in the exhibition explore the themes of displacement, creativity, loneliness, a disempowering sense of guilt, and social exclusion. Ready utilises impersonation and the performative aspect of photography to bring to life an undeservedly forgotten female writer and her works, stigmatized in the past for her incarceration in the mental asylum. 

Through enactment and staging Ania Ready recreates the emotions elicited by extreme living conditions, and expresses them in black and white photographs of cinematographic quality. In this solo show the images are accompanied by audio recordings of excerpts of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska’s works.