THE WOMEN’S ART ACTIVATION SYSTEM
The Milky Way
Participatory Game Score
2021
The Milky Way is a sticker-activity for National Gallery visitors that explores breastfeeding in paintings. Participants search the Gallery for works that feature infants nursing, and then put a matching sticker onto the game board. The Milky Way opens a portal into a new way of experiencing the National Gallery collection.
The Women’s Art Activation System (The WAAS) is an artist collective that makes live art, performance and socially engaged artworks. Working with humour they make rituals, games and processes that enquire into, and shift, established social power dynamics.
Principal artists Sharon Bennett and Sarah Dixon have been collaborating as The WAAS since 2016, and much of their work centres on questions around reproduction and care. They are representatives for Pregnancy and Mothering on the Disconnected Bodies Arts Advisory Board The WAAS participated in the round table discussion “Care as a Collective Responsibility” at the Future Collect Conference Handle with Care hosted by Manchester Art Gallery and Iniva.
In 2021-22 The WAAS were commissioned to work with Axisweb, Social Art Network and Manchester Metropolitan University on Social Art for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (SAFEDI) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This commission led to the creation of The Milky Way, a game-activity for visitors to the National Gallery in London. The event was documented in photography by Catherine Harder.
Other works include the interactive performance A Visit by the Officials from the Bureau for the Validation of Art performed at the Grace Exhibition Space in New York via Zoom, and at arts festivals in Oxford, Manchester, London and Stroud. The Baby Makers is a series of facilitated workshops for women in pregnancy and post-birth funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. In The Baby Makers: Making History, The WAAS collaborated with Museum in the Park, Stroud to create a collective artwork with local mothers that is now housed in the museum’s permanent collection.
