Speech by Dr Jane Bullen, WEL NCC member at the opening of the exhibition UNSEEN Women: Domestic Violence, Disability and Homelessness opened at NSW Parliament House (weekdays between 9:00am to 5:00pm until 28 August) showcasing powerful artworks by women with ‘lived experience’.

The UNSEEN Arts Hub is a multimedia project which gives voice to women’s homelessness and housing insecurity. WEL NSW was instrumental in initiating UNSEEN in 2020, partnering with Belinda Mason, OAM, the founder of the Museum of Understanding Through Tolerance and Inclusion (MUTTI). 

Dr Jane Bullen, WEL National Co-ordinating Committee

In late 2019, the Women’s Electoral Lobby NSW held a panel discussion on homelessness among women and decided to campaign on Housing and Homelessness. UNSEEN started as part of this campaign. This has happened in the context of  sharp rises in homelessness among women.

WEL, established in 1972, is a non-profit, member driven, independent, non-party political lobby group dedicated to creating a society where women’s participation and our ability to fulfil our potential are unrestricted, acknowledged and respected and where everyone shares equally in society’s responsibilities and rewards.

Around the time we decided to campaign on housing and homelessness, I had heard about a project by Scottish Women’s Aid, which used photography, and which enabled women who had experienced domestic violence to share information about issues affecting them and barriers in rebuilding their lives. Women who participated in this project met with Scottish government representatives, to call on the Government to do more to prevent women and children’s homelessness as a result of domestic violence.

I found this project inspiring, and a different way to provide a forum for women to speak of their experiences through creativity, and to raise these issues with governments.  One of the Women’s Electoral Lobby Executive members, Jenny Muir, put me in touch with Belinda Mason, who is an award-winning photographer, social documentarian and human rights advocate, and Belinda was keen to partner with WEL on a project. The project is a little different to the Scottish Project but the philosophy is similar. 

I suggested naming the project UNSEEN because of the unseen nature of many women’s homelessness. Women who become homeless often manage their homelessness themselves, and they are more likely to do so than men. Rather than approaching services or visibly sleeping rough, many women instead stay temporarily with family, friends and acquaintances, stay in severely overcrowded dwellings, sleep rough in less visible locations or disguise their homelessness if even if they are visible. Or they stay in unsafe and violent situations. Women’s greater hidden homelessness means women’s experiences of homelessness are disregarded and could be expected to result in a failure to understand the scale and nature of women’s homelessness.

Women often report avoiding services because the pathways to get help are few and services may be unable to meet their needs. The word Unseen reflects that there is a responsibility on the part of governments and the community more generally, to see, to notice, to recognise women’s homelessness and to act on it.

Women’s Electoral Lobby was successful in getting a grant from the Sydney City Council to partner with Belinda on the project in Sydney during 2021.  Unseen had multiple activations in the City of Sydney during that year and the project connected with many people as participants, volunteers and audiences.

Since then, the UNSEEN mobile Arts Hub has been successful in obtaining funding for multiple additional activations as described by Belinda. WEL has strongly supported the expansion of the mobile UNSEEN Arts Hub but has not been actively involved.

We had originally intended to hold an UNSEEN exhibition here in NSW Parliament House in 2021, but it was deferred because of COVID and other reasons. It’s really exciting to see this exhibition finally happening! I thank Belinda and all the wonderful women artists who’ve created Unseen, and everyone who has contributed to bringing this to fruition. I hope that people enjoy seeing this amazing art, and that this exhibition brings the message about housing and homelessness among women to parliamentarians and others, and that this leads to some real change.