More and more all-female art shows are popping up around London. Recent exhibitions include Interior at Hales Gallery, Pretty Vacant at Transition Gallery, and, best of all, Rapunzel, Rapunzel at Shoreditch Town Hall which showcased eight up-and-coming London artists for three days in August.

Brian Sewell, art critic for the Evening Standard, was quoted in the Independent as saying, “There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.” A less 1950s attitude might be that, as in most male-dominated industries where men hold the majority of senior positions, women in the art world have to try twice as hard to get the same recognition as men.

Artist and curator Sarah Kate Wilson organised Rapunzel, Rapunzel in the belief that women need to join forces and work together to make their mark on the art world. She emphasises the importance of building networks amongst female artists as a means of exchanging ideas and evoking inspiration. One way to do this would be for graduate school programs to initiate crossover with their group shows, combining students from different universities in the same show/

Through her paintings, Wilson investigates the difference between "high art" and "low art" - between what is hung in a museum and what is painted on a wall. Her work is painterly and playful while maintaining an "in your face" quality, and she uses materials like glitter and colours like pink that are stereotypically associated with craft making and femininity. "Pink is a colour that hits you," she says, "and decoration is not a dirty word, nor a bad thing in art.”

All the artists in Rapunzel, Rapunzel share a playfulness with materials combined with a strong sense of feminity. They achieve this by applying traditional methods like painting, drawing and sculpture to explore fanciful themes like fairytales, dreams, mythology, and imaginary worlds. Wilson refers to her art as “unruly girl work” which she explains as demanding attention by exuding a hint of mischievousness and rebelliousness as if her paintings have personalities of their own.