This work was included in the ‘Hayward Annual ‘78’ which was the first exhibition sponsored by the Art’s Council to be selected by a panel consisting entirely of women: Liliane Linn, Rita Donagh, Kim Lim, Tess Jaray and Gillian Wise. In contrast to the previous Hayward Annual which had weighed heavily on male artists, the panel chose to exhibit twenty-three artists, only seven of whom were men. The exhibition had a political context as Lucy Lippard announced in the introduction to the catalogue: ‘While it is of course primarily an art show, it was also chosen with an overtly political goal in mind: to bring to the attention of the public the quality of the work of women artists in Britain in the context of a mixed show’ … they hoped to show that the ‘aesthetic quality [of previous shows] had suffered from the “exclusive” bias toward male artists’ ('Hayward Annual ’78'). At the time there was controversy over this selection. Sandra Blow was careful not to link herself to politics, she hated being categorised and disliked being labelled a 'female artist’.


This collage demonstrates some of the first advances by Sandra Blow into using torn paper collage in her compositions - a feature which gave her work a freer more spontaneous feel and a technique which became synonymous with her later works. There is a certain energy and movement to these deceptively simple early collages. The patterns were influenced by Blow’s fascination in the asymmetry of African Sculpture, specifically photographs seen in ‘Figures in Wood of West Africa’ (1947) by the sculpture Leon Underwood.

At the ‘Hayward Annual, 1978’ they were displayed in an asymmetric pattern to emphasis the lack of symmetry within the collages. Blow kept these works in her collection until her death - they lined the stairs in her St Ives studio and would have been an ongoing influence on her later work.