Collection: Margaret Harrison

Margaret Harrison (born 1940) is a British artist whose work from the early 1970s onwards brought feminist politics into direct contact with conceptual practice. Her 1971 solo exhibition in London was closed by police on its first day following complaints about a drawing depicting Hugh Hefner as a Playboy bunny — an early indication of the provocations her work would continue to stage. Harrison’s practice combined drawing, painting, photography and text to examine the representation of women in popular culture, the conditions of women’s labour, and the structures of power that organised both. Her 1977 collaboration with Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly, Women and Work, documented the impact of the Equal Pay Act on women workers in a South London factory and remains a landmark of socially engaged feminist art in Britain.