As part of our season of Suffrage-themed events and exhibitions, we have been working with artist Soham De to create a new artefact trail mural on site at Cheney School where the Rumble Museum is based.
We asked Soham to design a mural based around six famous photographs of the suffrage movement. Two of these photographs feature the Mud March of 9th February 1907 through London, which was organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.
One of the photographs features a suffragette being arrested, and the remaining photographs are of the three prominent suffragettes: Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Wilding Davison and Annie Kenney. These photographs meant that the mural would include both the suffragist and suffragette parts of the Women’s Suffrage story.
Soham came up with the design below.
He started painting last weekend and below you can see pictures of his progress. He started by printing off A4 coloured sheets with simplified versions of the sketches, which he then stuck to the wall, over tracing paper. He then used pencil to trace the basic outline of the mural.
The tracing took most of last weekend. This weekend he has begun painting the three suffragettes in the middle of the mural.
Soham continued to work on the mural over summer and is now almost finished, as you can see from the photos below. We have also added an information board to explain the mural scenes: