Barbara Steveni is probably the most influential artist you’ve never heard of. So our guide tells us on our tour of I Find Myself, a retrospective on Steveni’s life and work opening March 1st at Modern Art Oxford. I’m ashamed to say that I count myself among those completely unaware of Steveni’s work before this point - but then, it’s exactly those gaps in knowledge that Steveni sought to fill. Her instincts as a researcher, an archivist, a collaborator, thrum through each chamber of Modern Art Oxford’s lofty upper floor, enhanced by a curation from Gareth Bell-Jones and Jo Melvin that mimics Steveni’s studio practices.

This is evident on entry; two boiler suits of Steveni’s hang from the gallery wall, while a video plays of her taking us through various ongoing projects in her studio. Turn around, and you will see the same projects under glass - cragged flints, browned recipes pressed beneath tarnished frames in ‘Ginger Biscuits’, or ‘Flowers for John’, preserving the dried funeral flowers of her husband, conceptual artist John Latham. The camera focuses on her hands, her commentary, the emphasis on her as an actor upon the objects she handles. These pieces have the salvaged quality that marked the sensibility of many post-war artists quite literally picking through the rubble to find meaning. In subsequent rooms, archival footage and slideshows play from steadily clicking Kodak carousels and heavy, grainy Sony TV units - it might be that these are the only mediums through which we can view their content, but it’s fitting that for an artist so concerned with otherwise abandoned objects, pre-digital analog and outdated technology are king in these halls.

Steveni has a particular fascination with the ambivalent power to lend an object permanence through art. On film, we hear her remark that she’s never sure whether she is creating, preserving or destroying in her artistic practice, and the first gallery’s largest installation, created in collaboration with her contemporary Laure Provost, is a reflection of that tension. ‘Dancing thought leftovers with Barbara’ suspends found and salvaged pieces from Steveni’s collections across the gallery ceiling, against a backdrop of Provost’s footage. It feels like the blast from an explosion suspended in time, at once cataclysmic and restorative. I was reminded of the phrase “collecting dust”, not here an expression of inaction or entropy, but active; sometimes dust is worthy of being collected.

Her instinct to grant context to items otherwise dismissed is perhaps no surprise given Steveni’s status (or lack thereof) in the art world. The second gallery focuses on Steveni’s establishment of the groundbreaking Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1965, an initiative to place artists within industrial or government projects. The projects from the group collated here reflect a community-minded approach to creativity that is conscious of its social function, one that current administrations could take more than a few notes from. Yet Steveni would regularly be diminished as the group’s ‘honourary secretary’ despite contributing more than her male counterparts, by their own admission.

Her frustration with this erasure is keenly felt, especially as correspondences on display seem to imply that the group could barely function without her. Similarly, her work was all too often eclipsed by that of her husband, an insecurity she expresses in a heartbreaking letter to Latham which can be found in the third gallery. Steveni’s tireless instinct to record, to recontextualise, extends to herself and her avant-garde female contemporaries so frequently overlooked by hegemonic art history. This is the impulse which led to the creation of the projects I AM AN ARCHIVE (2002-2015) and Conversations Between Ourselves (2013-2019), viewable in the third gallery.

But despite the fact Steveni is the focus of her own archive, it’s never self-aggrandising; indeed, there’s an unselfish, almost altruistic quality to these projects. Recipes recur across the works presented here - in the aforementioned ‘Ginger Biscuits’, or most notably in the tongue-in-cheek ‘Banner’ that Steveni created for the Union of Artists of St. Petersburg Borscht exhibition in 1993. The banner, with letters from the British Civil Service spread across the canvas in Russian translation, is annotated in Russian with the words ‘Ingredients’, ‘Recipe’, ’Method’, ‘Preparation’. In handing down this ‘recipe’, Steveni was hoping to see what the Union could cook up - her banner acts as both a subversion and a vindication of this traditionally feminine-coded method of passing down information. Her studio tour, in its own way, is an extension of that thinking. The focus is on the chef, yes, but on their method, not their personality, so that others might learn and draw from it. As an exhibition, I Find Myself puts this into practise through its collaborations with Anne Bean, Eloise Hawser and Laure Provost, drawing Steveni’s legacy from the shadows and acting upon it to create new and original works. Steveni would never have wanted her archive to be static and cloistered, but instead something living, expanding and looking ever-outward. In I Find Myself, we do indeed find Steveni, but through her we find so much more; I think she’d be proud of that.