The official Daphne du Maurier website, approved by her Estate
Women of Cornwall Exhibition, The Parlour, Art Centre Penryn, 28th March - 26th April 2025
Women of Cornwall, in collaboration with ceramic artist Katie Bunnell, will create a new collection of 50 plates highlighting and celebrating significant women of Cornwall.
The plates will become a permanent collection at Art Centre Penryn.
The idea of a collection of fifty plates is not unprecedented. Between 1932 and 1934, the Famous Women Dinner Service, a set of 50 dinner plates, was created by two of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Forty-eight of the plates represented notable women who fell into four groups - Women of Letters, Queens, Beauties and Dancers and Actresses. The remaining two plates were of the artists themselves. So, in actual fact, the complete set was of forty-nine women and one man.
A second collection of plates called The Dinner Party was created by US feminist artist Judy Chicago, assisted by numerous volunteers between 1974 and 1979. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The goal of this collection was to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.
The Women in Cornwall project is a tremendous undertaking and has generated a lot of interest.
One of three walls showing images and a write-up about each of the women
Last November, the first phase began when the project invited the public to suggest women to feature on a plate, women who have made meaningful contributions to the region in a broad range of areas:
visual arts sciences engineering literature environment farming fishing health sport social care community & voluntary action maritime hospitality education performing arts business and enterprise media leadership politics
Discovering women not yet recognised for their achievements was particularly important to the project, with no achievement being too small. An amazing number of women's names were put forward. By the time the deadline of 30th November 2024 was reached, 234 women had been nominated, each of them highlighting and celebrating their fantastically varied achievements.
Portraits of some of the women created at the Portraits Workshops
The showcased women come from history, myth, and contemporary life and span a range of careers, as well as activism and volunteering roles. They include a steamship company director, footballer, Master fishmonger, artists, carers, surfers, scientists and many more
Here at the Daphne du Maurier website, we put Daphne du Maurier's name forward, so she is included, too.
Photographs and descriptions of Daphne du Maurier, and next to her, Daphne Skinnard, well known to us from BBC Radio Cornwall and the du Maurier Fowey Literary festival
Jane Slade, another Women of Cornwall suggestion, and one that it very familiar to us at the Daphne du Maurier website
Another look at Daphne du Maurier's image and description
The Women of Cornwall Exhibition presents all 234 women in a glorious display at The Parlour, Art Centre Penryn, Thursday to Saturday, 10am 4pm, from 28th March - 26th April 2025. Each woman is pictured and has a write-up about her. Portrait workshops took place across Cornwall to enable people to learn about the project, exchange stories of inspirational women, and draw and paint images of some of these fantastic women. These portraits are also displayed at the exhibition.
Do try to go along if you are in the area. If that is not possible, you can go to the project website and see all 234 selected womenhttps://www.artcentrepenryn.org/suggested-women. They are displayed in alphabetical order by their first names.
Funding needed to be raised in order to get the first phase of The Women of Cornwall project off the ground, and now further funding is being applied for in order to begin phase two, the creation of the fifty plates.
The final selection of fifty remarkable women from the initial 234 will be difficult. They are likely to include women who are alive today, women from history and maybe even from myth. Their Cornishness will be fluid, but their achievements will have a special connection with Cornwall. In order to arrive at a final list of fifty, an advisory panel has been created to help capture a diverse and inspirational group of women.
Of course, here at the Daphne du Maurier website, we very much hope that Daphne will be included in the final fifty. We will let you know what is happening as more information becomes available.
Ann Willmore, March 2025.