Attempts at perfection in the representation of our project would be, I decide, disingenuous. What would the suggestion of a DIY sensibility, the acid green filter, the xeroxed effect, the physical newsletters and the nod to the Guerrilla Girls signify? Would they not just serve to conceal the mechanism of polishing and honing, themselves reduced to an empty gesture? Simon (hi, Simon) who built our website, already instructed us at our first meeting that to conflate the digital and the analogue, inducing the former to imitate the latter, was a form of dishonesty that he couldn’t abide, so that learned us. Among the first, virgin slices of many humble pies to appear, exuberant, at our table.

Then I am struck by an idea, while considering the anatomy of the honesty/dishonesty spectrum that has been invoked, its confluence with that of analogue/digital, and of DIY/ designed within an inch of its life by an expensive man named Chris (hi, Chris). This idea is that there is a relationship, somewhere, which is worth looking at, between honesty and risk, the risk of exposing oneself, and that this may be fertile ground in which to sow the early seeds intended to elucidate our project.

First, metaphor: a person who tells the truth is referred to as “laying themselves bare”, an association formed between honesty and the vulnerability of nakedness, its inherent risk; a stripped-back recording of a song, unadorned and therefore more reflective of the truth, is called “naked”; to “put one’s cards on the table” is to make visible a private reality, enabling its use against you, revelation itself as risk; to “come clean” suggests the removal of a protective, if obfuscatory layer.

Second, etymology: I may be scraping several barrels here, but I managed to trace the presence of a relationship between notions of honesty and risk via the words “wager” and “pledge”, both of which arrive at a conclusion involving risk of emotional or material forfeiture that follows betting an object precious to one on an uncertain outcome in the former, and the giving of one’s word — the making of a promise — in the latter. Then there is the phenomenon of “pledging one’s troth”, troth a phonetic doublet of truth, both derived from the Old English trēowþ which means loyalty, fidelity, the state of being “true”. To pledge one’s troth, or archaically, to plight one’s troth, is to become betrothed to a person, to make a commitment to them, literally by pledging, offering up, one’s truth. The word “pledge” has its origin in the Old English plēon, meaning “to endanger, risk, or expose to danger”. So, in this moment of honesty, of promising, one puts one’s faithfulness, one’s truth, at risk. Incidentally, plēon derives from the Proto-West Germanic root *plehan, meaning to stand up for, take care of, or be responsible for. It is also related to the Old English verb plegan: to play. Hmmm.

As I am circling this drain it dawns on me that in the description of a project which involves both the offering up of a commitment and the risk attendant on it, the promise of standing up for, taking care of, and being responsible for each other and our artists, and which is indeed marked by the play, the plegan, of experimentation, it makes sense for me to just sit down and see what comes out, and that herein lies justification for simply jotting down a few impressions, leaving them unedited (hi, Hanna), and calling it praxis. One of our artists, Frances, tells me that to present the sketch, that which is usually regarded as unfinished, as the preparatory work, and which — painting having been left to the men — historically was seen also as women’s work, to present it as the thing in itself, is what makes it special, is what she loves about drawing. On hearing this, I think to myself that that’s what we’re doing with the agency, hence my repeated use of the word “project”, for it is by no means complete, perfect, or fixed in its form. It is an experiment, an art project, a happening, and an invitation to partake of an inter-personal involvement which we hope will be non-extractive, but rather collaborative, supportive, expansive, and creatively freeing for everyone involved.

Third, then, let’s say anecdotally: I, sufferer of OCD, incorrigible perfectionist, occasional control freak, am risking myself more by writing something not fully formed, mediocre and potentially a bit of a mess. Ta-da.

So, below are a few things which have happened since me and Hanna decided to do this, and a few things I have felt and thought in the process.
For the past year or so, we have been rehearsing to ourselves why it is important for us to represent only women, to hold ourselves accountable in relation to the idea, not wanting to find ourselves suddenly without a real belief in it but having to defend it nonetheless. Since we began work, we have been grubbing around in the mire of the question, finding texts to both articulate and justify, sending each other essays and books to read, drawing inspiration from one place and then another, changing our minds, sketching and then, as it were, rubbing out. Several ideas were most pertinent at the thing’s conception, concerning the redistribution of wealth, the desire to facilitate a structure through which female artists can be represented by an agency without a percentage of their earnings ending up in the hands of a few male suits. Recently I looked back on the notes I had made in the very beginning, when A Room of One’s Own was our primary inspiration, and found this. I’m going, since there’s no-one here to stop me, to quote myself:

For fun, let’s call the thing we want to cultivate a female gaze, which is really anything that is not the male gaze: a way of seeing that does not exoticise or objectify women, that neither worships nor disparages them. And, in this spirit, let’s eliminate the time-wasting task of defining ourselves in relation to men. We hope that by starting an agency where womanhood is the default, we can provide a space beyond reductive and limiting definitions, removing ourselves from an arena where women are described, looked at, theorised, categorised, othered, reduced to tropes and used as mirrors. Instead, we will be left in peace, clearer in our identity and our ambitions, to get on, undisturbed, with the business of making our art.

Well, I still think that all sounds good. But from an aesthetic point of view, why do we love women’s work so much? What is it about it that excites us so?

Me and Hanna were lying in bed one morning, having this conversation again, and found that we kept returning to the idea of risk. Hanna was telling me a story about a beautiful young woman she saw eating dinner with an old, clearly wealthy man, and a remark she heard someone make about “gold digging”. She was struck in that moment by the lack of a counterpart to the phrase “gold digger”, that while plenty of language exists for the shaming of women working for their survival, there is a semantic black hole which protects men.

To partake of the social and cultural category of womanhood is to be made the object of a language shored up by and itself informing a moralising, gendered expectation gap. When Tracey Emin was fifteen she entered a dance competition, full of hope and excitement at the prospect of winning and getting the chance to dance on telly. When she got on stage, all the adult men who had slept with her began, in unison, to chant the word “slag” until she ran off stage in tears: adult men who elude description, for whom language offers no counterpart, no corresponding term, to the word “slag”.

Whether dancing or anything else, to make art as a woman is to put one’s head above the parapet. The female-coded body is the site of risk, and this risk necessarily enters the work, is implicit. The stakes are higher. Does that make it more interesting, more appealing, more vital? Don’t ask me!

We got onto the idea of risk-taking more broadly, onto the subject of tornado chasing. A few weeks before this chat in bed, I had been to a dinner party and had a conversation with someone who had just made a book about storm chasers, who informed me that it was largely a male pursuit. I wasn’t surprised, and I thought about what Kant had to say about the “dynamic sublime”, the aesthetic experience of nature’s might involving awe and resulting in a sense of sublimity. The instigating event: contact, from a place of shelter, with that which would otherwise annihilate us. The destructive forces of the natural world; a volcano erupting, lightning striking, the waves of a stormy sea crashing. The elemental, and our psyche’s ability to perceive and survive it, when experienced from a position of safety, gives us the impression of being put in touch with the sublime, inducing awe which would otherwise be interfered with by baser and more primal responses, by fear, by the need to survive. Why then, might it mostly be men who feel safer, find it easier, consider it a possibility even, to get near a tornado? How many women are denied access to the sublime because of fear, because of a need to mitigate the risk inscribed in the very experience of living as a woman?

Here, Hanna suggested a connection between the male storm-chasing impulse and the feminine impulse to watch horror, and above all, true crime. An attempt at mastering our fear, at observing that which threatens us from a distance, not only thus reducing its magnitude and diminishing its power, but using it in the production of pleasure, of a thrill.

So, the tornado for us has become a kind of emblem, the kind you might get tattooed on your wrist.

Coincidentally, Frances, the artist I mentioned above, often features tornados in her work, always through a window or contained by a frame, from the vantage point of a safe, enclosed interior. I asked her why this was. For her full reply, you’ll have to read the up-coming write-up on her work, but perhaps you can imagine what she said.

I interviewed the novelist Chris Kraus several months ago, and one of the questions I asked her, on the subject of the relationship between pleasure, knowledge and danger, was “how much should you risk yourself?”, meaning, how far should you go in the pursuit of expansive, pleasure-inducing, experiential knowledge? How much danger can be allowed for in the pursuit of a stimulating life? In other words, how close should you get to the tornado? Her reply: “As much as you possibly can and still be safe. Because you want to be able to come back and write about it.” Yes, you need to come back and write about it, not just for yourself, but for other people, for other women. The work is a mechanism of encouragement, it is the photograph of the storm which demonstrates the reality of your proximity to it and your subsequent survival.

I now realise that the whole question of risk is one that must have been lurking for a while in my semi-conscious. It seems to me that the reason it has persisted — the thing I hadn’t been acknowledging — is that the element of risk inherent to women’s work, the thing about it that we love so, applies also to this endeavour, to the making of The Other Room. Just as the female artist has much to lose in her wagering, her pledging, her work containing a greater proportion of plēon, so too we find ourselves betting an enormous amount, pledging our troth, without any guarantees surrounding the outcome.

Hanna is strong-willed, bossy and obstinate. I am conflict averse, vengefully let her have her way and make lists of the small ways in which she has infringed on my happiness which I save up and read out at the end of the working day. Who is more of a pain in the arse? It depends who you ask.

We had a conversation recently about power. I said something about it being the responsibility of each person to resist not only external forms of power that attempt to act on them, but also one’s own, internal impulse to use power against other people. Hanna disagreed; she thinks women should be able to make use of certain kinds of power which didn’t use to be at our disposal, and which men do have a responsibility to resist utilising. We decided to come back to it later.

That morning I had had another conversation with our friend Song-I, when Hanna was in the other room, about whether or not your boyfriend’s intelligence needs to function as an organising principle for your life. After witnessing the above exchange, she told me she didn’t think I needed a boyfriend for that, because I have Hanna.

People keep telling us it’s a risk to start a business with your friend, that it’ll go wrong and we’ll end up falling out. This feels like a very male perspective, one that does not account for the deep love and trust present in women’s friendships with each other, in our friendship; a love and trust which cannot be made subaltern to success or destroyed by failure, making this risk, to us, a non-issue.

That isn’t to say we haven’t pissed each other off, we’ve been annoyed with each other for weeks now, but we’re still best mates. We are learning, when we feel angry, to assimilate the feeling as a dimension of our intimacy, knowing that it is a safe feeling, that it has no destructive potential that we ourselves don’t lend it. Women’s social safety has always relied on behaving well, being palatable, and therefore being chosen, but we can choose not to relate to each other in this way, to stick together even when we’re not getting on, because we’ve made a commitment, a pledge, of belonging with each other, of plehan. Instead of making conflict unacceptable, we are inviting the unacceptable into our relationship; instead of thinking we won’t fall out, we know we will, but that we needn’t let it matter for long, and this means we are free to enjoy the excitement and the pleasure of risking it.

Thank you to Sarah Dawes, who came along exactly when we needed her and made our dreams come true, to the very gifted Christopher Lawson and Simon Rogers, both of whom have the patience of saints, to the brilliant Isabella Burley, and to our sweet friend and general clever sausage Song-I Saba.