Ellen Lesperance, Stay Safe, 2018, gouache and graphite on tea-stained paper, 42 × 29 1⁄2".
Ellen Lesperance
Derek Eller Gallery
“Woolly minds in woolly hats”: That’s how critics disparaged the female antinuke protesters who occupied the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, UK, from 1981 to 2000. As disdain mounted between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev in the early 1980s, a distaff coalition of pacifists rolled up to the perimeter of a Royal Air Force base to protest the installation of US nuclear warheads targeting the Soviet Union. Their encampments—destroyed periodically, but ever resurgent—persisted for nearly two decades. The women’s minds were not fuzzy, but their jumpers were: For their blockades and other demonstrations at the base, many donned hand-knitted sweaters featuring doves, snakes, witches, crescent moons, bombs, tents, and other symbols of their ideological formation and the camp’s physical instantiation. Against belligerent
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