The Blazing Comet of Pauline Boty

Award-winning author Ali Smith describes how she came to discover the life and work of ‘the first female pioneer of the British Pop art movement’. ‘I was working on a book called Autumn,’ recalls the multi award-winning author, playwright and journalist Ali Smith, who has four times been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. ‘And I came upon a picture by a female artist I’d never heard of. She was a Pop artist. I was like, “There’s been a female Pop artist?” So I looked her up and up came these amazing images of things I’d never seen — [they were] so colourful and so full of energy and brio.’ The artist, Smith discovered, was British and rose to fame in the 1960s. Her name was Pauline Boty. The Scottish author of acclaimed novels such as Hotel World (2001), The Accidental (2005) and How to Be Both (2014) was captivated and in 2016 she wrote about Boty for The Guardian newspaper, describing her as ‘the first female pioneer of the British Pop art movement’. In our film, Smith goes further, declaring that this charismatic, rebellious, free-spirited figure ‘was pretty much the earliest feminist artist’. Find out more: https://ift.tt/2O7TMLT