Gee Vaucher (born Carole Vaucher in 1945 in Dagenham, Essex, England) is a British visual artist primarily associated with the anarcho-punk band Crass. Her work encompasses collage, photomontage, painting, illustration, photography, sculpture, film and installation.
Although Vaucher's work for Crass has been central to her public reputation, her artistic practice predates the band and has continued for several decades after its dissolution. Art historian Rebecca Binns has situated her work in relation to twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde art, counterculture, feminism, punk design and political protest.
Biography
Vaucher met her long-time creative partner Penny Rimbaud in the early 1960s when both were attending the South-East Essex Technical College and School of Art. The name 'Gee' derives from 'Grout', Rimbaud having responded to something Vaucher was complaining about with 'stop grouting' (rather than 'stop grousing'); "I said, 'you mean grousing'. Anyway, the Grout name stuck and everyone started calling me Grout, and then it gradually got shortened to Gee."
In 1967, inspired by the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness, they set up the anarchist/pacifist open house Dial House in Essex, UK, which has now become firmly established as a 'centre for radical creativity'.
Vaucher and Rimbaud were also involved in the experimental performance group EXIT during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Material from the group, including film of performances in Colchester, was later included in Vaucher's retrospective exhibition at Firstsite.
During the 1970s Vaucher lived for a period in New York City, where she worked as a political illustrator. She also produced the magazine International Anthem, combining political writing with collage, photography and illustration. Rebecca Binns has described this period as important in the development of the visual methods Vaucher later employed in her work with Crass.
In 2016, Vaucher was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex.
From November 2016 to February 2017, Firstsite in Colchester presented Gee Vaucher: Introspective, described by the gallery as her first major institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom. The exhibition surveyed more than forty years of her practice and included collage, photography, photomontage, painting, sculpture, film, performance, typography, sound and installation. It brought together work associated with EXIT, International Anthem, Crass and Vaucher's later independent practice.
Her work with anarcho-punk band Crass was seminal to the 'protest art' of the 1980s. Vaucher has always seen her work as a tool for social change, and has expressed her strong anarcho-pacifist and feminist views in her paintings and collages. Vaucher also uses surrealist styles and methods.
Vaucher's artwork for Crass included record sleeves, posters, booklets, films and other visual material. Her combinations of painting, collage and photomontage became closely associated with the visual identity of the band and with the wider anarcho-punk movement.
She continues to design sleeves for Babel Label, and also designed the sleeve for The Charlatans' Who We Touch album. Vaucher has exhibited at the 96 Gillespie gallery in London. In 2007 and 2008, the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco and Track 16 in Santa Monica ran exhibitions titled "Gee Vaucher: Introspective", showing a wide selection of Vaucher's work.
On the day after Donald Trump's election victory in November 2016, the British Daily Mirror newspaper featured Vaucher's 1989 painting Oh America on its front page.
A Week of Knots
Vaucher's A Week of Knots (2013–2022) reworks Max Ernst's 1934 collage novel Une semaine de bonté. Vaucher removed figures from reproductions of Ernst's original collages and developed new compositions informed by psychiatrist R. D. Laing's writings, particularly Knots.
The project uses the combination of Ernst's collage techniques and Laing's analysis of interpersonal relationships to explore the family, violence, power and care. Material from A Week of Knots was included in the Firstsite retrospective.
Published collections
In the foreword to her first book, a 1999 retrospective collection entitled Crass Art and Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters, Ian Dury writes:
"In its original form, Gee's work is intricate and tactile, and while the imagery is sometimes almost overwhelming, the primary concerns are those of a painter; dealing with form and space. Mere newsprint would hardly do justice to its subtle tones. When the work is printed, the space becomes more simple and the graphic images take on a different life. The concerns are those of delivery, and the message is clear."
Vaucher's film Gower Boy, made in collaboration with pianist Huw Warren, debuted at the 14th Raindance Film Festival in London in October 2006.
In 2012, Vaucher made the experimental film Angel, which premiered at the 20th Raindance Film Festival in London. The approximately 40-minute film consists almost entirely of a close-up image of a young girl's face, which moves and changes expression only subtly over the course of the work. Contemporary descriptions characterised it as an "exercise in visual perception" concerned with childhood, innocence and the transition toward adulthood.
The film developed from Vaucher's wider interest in representations of children, also explored in her series Children Who Have Seen Too Much Too Soon. The official Raindance programme described Angel as a work positioned between cinema and gallery-based video art, in which minimal changes in the subject's expression and a restrained soundtrack create an open-ended sense of narrative.
Angel was subsequently screened as part of the programme accompanying Gee Vaucher: Introspective at Firstsite in 2016, followed by a discussion with Vaucher and the film's subject. It was also shown in 2013 at the Cité de la musique in Paris alongside a performance by Penny Rimbaud's Last Amendment.
In 2023, Angel was included in the exhibition Machinations at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, alongside Vaucher's Children Who Have Seen Too Much Too Soon, the book Lost and her 2020 video Silence. The museum catalogue records Angel as a 2012 colour video with sound running 40 minutes and 37 seconds.
Exhibitions and recognition
The 2016–2017 exhibition Gee Vaucher: Introspective at Firstsite was Vaucher's first major institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom and presented work from across more than four decades of her career. Reviewing the exhibition in The Quietus, Rebecca Binns argued that it presented Vaucher's work for Crass as one part of a much broader artistic practice encompassing illustration, collage, painting and installation.
In 2023, Vaucher's work was included in Machinations at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The exhibition brought together artistic and research projects around machines, social organisation, schizoanalysis, war and care. Vaucher also contributed to the exhibition catalogue, published by the museum.
Her work was also included in Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain in 2023–2024.
In 2024, White Columns in New York presented CRⒶSS OVER – Gee Vaucher: Crass & Beyond. The gallery described it as the most comprehensive exhibition of Vaucher's work then staged in the United States and her first exhibition in New York in almost two decades.
Critical studies
In 2022, art historian Rebecca Binns published Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avant-Garde with Manchester University Press. The book examines Vaucher's career from her art-school and countercultural work through her involvement with Crass and her later independent practice, situating her work in relation to avant-garde art, feminism, counterculture, punk and political art. Manchester University Press describes it as the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher's work.
In 2024, Stevphen Shukaitis published "Years of Untying Knots: Gee Vaucher and Collaging the Politics of the Family between Ernst and Laing" in the peer-reviewed Journal of Avant-Garde Studies. The article examines Vaucher's A Week of Knots in relation to the collage practice of Max Ernst and the psychoanalytic writing of R. D. Laing, with particular attention to violence, power, care and the changing nature of family relations.
↑"Gower Boy". Fourteenth Raindance Film Festival. Raindance. 1 October 2006. Archived from the original on 14 November 2006.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
Binns, Rebecca. Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avant-Garde. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. ISBN 978-1-5261-4789-9.
McKay, George. "Gee Vaucher's Punk Painting as Record Sleeves." In Stevphen Shukaitis, ed., Gee Vaucher: Introspective, pp. 64–74. Colchester: Firstsite, 2016.
Shukaitis, Stevphen. "Years of Untying Knots: Gee Vaucher and Collaging the Politics of the Family between Ernst and Laing." Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 5, no. 1 (2024): 57–77. doi:10.1163/25896377-00501004.
Binns, Rebecca. "Between the Human and the Animal: Gee Vaucher at Firstsite." The Quietus, 15 January 2017.
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