Presented by Virago Women’s Workshop in Leeds, Out of Her Tiny Mind was a bold, unapologetic celebration of women’s creativity, complexity, and resistance. Running from October 2024 to March 2025 and curated to coincide with International Women’s Day 2025, the exhibition brought together artists working across mediums — from painting and sculpture to print, collage, and artist book — to explore the intersections of feminism, madness, sexism, and politics.

The title itself was a reclamation: a phrase historically used to belittle and silence women, here turned inside out and transformed into a rallying cry. Out of Her Tiny Mind was about the small things — the overlooked details, the fleeting thoughts, the quiet acts that might otherwise go unnoticed. It asked what happens when those small things are allowed to accumulate, to grow louder, to refuse erasure. It was about the moment you wonder whether you are mad, or the world is — and about how small acts of resistance, repeated and shared, become enormous.

Housed within Virago’s former women-only creative space in Headingley, the show reflected the organisation’s founding ethos: to create a safe, single-sex space where women could gather, make, and speak freely. Established in 2021, Virago Women’s Workshop offered events, socials, meetings, workshops, exhibitions, and a feminist library and archive — and Out of Her Tiny Mind encapsulated that mission. Intimate in scale and eclectic in spirit, the exhibition featured many small works and objects that invited close looking and personal connection, each piece contributing its own detail and perspective to a larger feminist conversation.

The exhibition included work by Kathryn Welford, Liberty Warwick, Emma Dolan, Sarah Lawson, Knit_Mum_Purl_Mum, and Fanny Graham. Through humour, provocation, tenderness, and critique, these artists offered a vision of what happens when women refuse to be small. Out of Her Tiny Mind was both art exhibition and act of defiance — a space that confronted damaging narratives, reclaimed language used against women, and insisted on the power of collective resistance. Although Virago is no longer based at the original venue, it continues to provide single-sex spaces for women in Leeds, carrying forward the same spirit of sisterhood and solidarity that defined this exhibition.

The work was originally scheduled to be shown at the FiLiA 2025 conference in Brighton. However, when concerns were raised about Fanny Graham’s piece Let Women Speak, Virago was asked to withdraw that particular work. After consultation with all of the artists, a collective decision was made: if one piece was excluded, none would be shown. In the spirit of “all for one, one for all,” the artists chose solidarity over compromise, withdrawing the entire exhibition and standing together — in sisterhood and defiance.