Rita Donagh is well known for her commentaries on Northern Ireland in a number of works which employ the concept of mapping and territorial organisation, frequently pin-pointing particularly horrific events in the region's recent history. Less well known is her concern for the role of woman as artist.

In the 1970s she was teaching at the Slade School of Art. This work commemorates her experience. On her first morning there she was shown up to the life drawing studio, the assumption being in the early 1970s that she was to start work as a life model not as a teacher. Here Donagh shows herself in a pose she would assume as a painter but without the support of a marl stick (a tool traditionally used to steady the arm holding the brush). Her fingers appear to magically conjure colour out of a space otherwise occupied by a grid of organisational lines - an unrelenting repetition of squares and right angles. While assuming the pose of a sexually desirable woman, at the same time she asserts her independence through lack of material support (the marl stick). The hair shielding the body evokes a Godiva-like determination to achieve what she has set out to do by sheer ingenuity in the face of all the sexual-political odds.

She has said that the print was her contribution to a staff presentaion portfolio, honouring William Coldstream, the much-loved Principal and Professor of Fine Art, on his retirement. It was also her homage to 'the wondderful etching studio' at the Slade School.