Differencing the Canon: Methods of Researching and Archiving Women's Sculptural Practices

Drawing on Griselda Pollock’s concept of feminist art history as a process ‘Differencing the Canon’ (1999) rather than adding women in or creating a separate space, Harriet Loffler, Curator of the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge will discuss with Griselda the curatorial challenges posed by this unique collection of contemporary works of art made by women, and donated, largely, by the artists themselves.  Open to the public, the works are displayed across the walls and architectural spaces of a modernist college so that the students’ enjoy a daily encounter with creations by women. As the collection has grown, research, archiving, conserving and exhibiting these works require new strategies to ensure that the significance of a collection that places so many women artists in conversation without the selectivity or prescribed narratives typical of modern museum collections. What is it to discover and make visible the collections unique importance as ‘a feminist space’ for art that reflects the diversity of women and their creativities, concerns, processes, humour, passions, and profound relevance?

Griselda Pollock is Professor Emerita of Social & Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds  where, between 1977 and 2020, she created ‘a feminist space at Leeds’. She is the 2020 Holberg Prize Laureate for her contribution to feminist art histories and cultural analyses from Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology (co-author Roszika Parker, 1981/ new edition 2021), Vision and Difference: Feminism,  Femininity and the Histories of Art (1988/re-issued 2004) and Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (1999) to Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and Archive (2007), After-Image/After-Affect: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2013) and the monograph, Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (2018). With Max Silverman she co-edited Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (2015) and Concentrationary Art; Jean Cayrol, The Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-War Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (2019). Her daring study linking Lee Krasner and Marilyn Monroe, Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press) and a revised, all-colour edition of her 1995 World of Art monograph, Mary Cassatt (Thames & Hudson) appeared in 2022. She initiated with Eleanor Clayton and has supported from the Holberg Award the research project on women and sculpture titled Hepworth’s Progeny and has also supported a one-year 0.5 curatorial post at the New Hall Collection of Murray-Edwards College, Cambridge.

Harriet Loffler is the Curator of The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the College, Harriet was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery from 2009–2018. In her role she led on all the contemporary exhibitions, public programming and publishing, partnership projects as well as the development of the modern and contemporary collection. She regularly contributes to conferences, panel discussions and public art commissioning panels. She has also worked at Frieze and the Frieze Art Fair in London and has an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. From 2019–2021 she was on the Board of Trustees at the David Parr House.

Eleanor Clayton is Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield and a Barbara Hepworth specialist. As Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool (2010–14) she curated displays around Hepworth’s work, alongside exhibitions of international modern art such as Mondrian and his Studios: Colour in Space and Nasreen Mohamedi. At The Hepworth Wakefield she has curated exhibitions such as Hepworth in Yorkshire and A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965–75, while bringing Hepworth’s work in dialogue with contemporary artists. Clayton has published widely on British Modern art. In addition to journal papers and reviews, she is editor and co-author of Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain and Alan Davie & David Hockney: Early Works. Her book Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life was published by Thames & Hudson in May 2021.

My research project, Les Practiciennes, explores the lives and works of the fin de siècle women sculptors of Paris, who have been associated, to varying degrees, with Auguste Rodin, many of whom were taught by him and some of whom worked for him. Each have an extraordinary, and in most cases unpublished, life narrative and little-known oeuvre. I have sought out two series of sculptural works by these sculptors to make paintings and drawings from. In my first selection these women are depicting women (often a friend or peer) with their eyes downcast or closed, looking away. I enjoy the ambiguity implicit in both the signalling of an empowered absorption or self-containment, alongside a reading of social conformity and female modesty. I have also become interested in sculptural portraiture where the sitter is in a friendship or relationship with the artist. Not only can this bring to light obscure[d] histories, it also allows me to speculate broadly on the ‘intersubjective’ relation that spirals around ‘ocular power’ within portraiture. Most of these portraits only exist as a photographic document – by painting and drawing them I attempt to exhume them, reflecting on the forgotten legacy of women sculptors. Fictional monologues also emerge from biographical moments in each of the artist’s lives.

As an artist-researcher I use creative methods including, memoirs and autobiography, re-enactment and performance; fiction and fabulation; correspondence, anecdote and oral histories as well as drawing and painting as a form of habitation and reflection. These methods run alongside more traditional academic scholarship within art history that has involved the study of archival information. I reimagine the ‘obscure’, staging a performative dialogue between the past and the present, across cultural and class divides. The creative research methods are the means by which it becomes possible to speak of women artists, buried in archives, but not entirely erased.

Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic. She was Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and at the Royal College of Art and is currently Head of the School of Fine Art and Professor of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art. She is also Founding Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Painting. Her books include Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words (1997), On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013) and A Companion to Contemporary Drawing (2021).  She has exhibited paintings and drawings in solos exhibitions at the Freud Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood and was Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, where she developed her project A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, published as a book by Slimvolume in 2020. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute from 2021–22. She has recently shown in Chronicles a group drawing project at 9A Projects, Todmorden (July 2022).

Drawing on life story recordings housed in the Artists’ Lives archive of National Life Stories – with a spotlight on Veronica Ryan’s ongoing life story recording – this paper reveals how the format of an Artists’ Lives recording – immediate, unrehearsed and subjective – is the ideal vehicle for capturing the slippage between spaces and disciplines (both figurative and literal) that many contemporary women sculptors explore in their work.

This conference paper integrates excerpts of compelling audio testimony to illustrate my argument that the life story approach is uniquely suited to enrich understanding of the working practices shared by many women sculptors. Life story recordings must be recognised as one of the most powerful tools in documenting and archiving a new, inclusive history of women practitioners. Life story recordings of women sculptors explore the sometimes-troubling conflation between private and public spaces, exposing the constitutive dualisms that have structurally excluded women sculptors. Liberal historical narratives record the history of the public sphere: life story recordings complicate these historical accounts by offering glimpses of the oft-concealed private sphere.

This paper argues that the life story process itself possesses a synchronicity with the subject matter captured. The life story as a form moves fluidly to negate often delineated boundaries, and, because of the aptitude of the medium, it speaks to an emergent generation of women who have a heightened critical (self) consciousness about how to navigate the complexities of contemporary life as a woman artist. This power of narration is neatly encapsulated in a critical distinction: self-representation is less ‘what I appear to others’ than ‘this is what I believe’. This paper expands the focus of what an inclusive methodology entails. By considering the personally narrated experiences of women sculptors such as Ryan and others, I argue that their autobiographical voices construct a holistic sense of what it means – both in challenge and achievement – to be a sculptor…who is also British woman.

Dr Hester R Westley is the Project Director for Artists’ Lives, National Life Stories, at the British Library. Hester’s recent research focuses on intersectional histories of female self-narration. Formerly Goodison Fellow for National Life Stories (2016/17), Hester favours modes of dissemination that highlight the aurality of her methodology. Highlights from Hester’s publications include: ‘Art Education for the Many: Clifford Ellis and the Founding of Corsham’ (2021); ‘The Many Lives of the Life Room’, in The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World 1960 to Now (2015); ‘Expanding the Boundaries: The New Creativity in Art Education’, in From Floor to Sky: the Experience of the Art School Studio (2010);’ and ‘The Year of the Locked Room: St Martin’s School of Art’, Tate Etc, issue 9, Spring 2007. Hester co-curated Reception, Rupture and Return: The Model in the Life Room: 1890 to Present (2014–15) and St Martin’s Sculpture Department: An Alternative History, 1964–71 (2007) at Tate Britain.

In 2019 Iwona Demko, a Polish visual artist and sculptress, invited, via Facebook, all women connected to the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland, to submit life stories: ‘Write, girls! Take care of your biographies!’ Similarly, Hélène Cixous in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) called women to, ‘Write your self. Your body must be heard’. In this paper I think alongside these calls to write to explore methods of Demko’s activist archival practice for her-stories. In 2016, inspired by the biography of Zofia Baltarowicz-Dzielińska, a Polish sculptor and the first woman student at the Academy in Kraków, Demko began tracing life stories of women connected to the Academy. She engages with a range of material testimonies of women’s existences to reconstruct their biographies. Patiently, attentively and carefully the artist visibilises her-stories and lives that have been hidden or erased from the official art his-story.

In this paper I explore Demko’s methods of archiving as activism for her-stories, including ‘wikiartivism’, radio podcasts, alternative journal publishing, or initiation of commemorative events such as the 2019 Year of Women from the Academy of Fine Arts celebrating women’s 100-year presence there. I focus on Demko’s 2021 exhibition Ile właściwie było wielkich artystek? (How many great women artists were there actually?) marking fifty years since the publication of Linda Nochlin’s essay ‘Why have there been no great women artists’ (1971). Demko’s ready-mades displayed together with drawings, letters, photographs and documents she discovered during her archival research were buried in rubble she installed in the gallery space. Delicate porcelain sculptures, decorated with quotes from Nochlin’s essay and writings of Maria Baszkircew, a nineteenth century Ukrainian-French artist, remind us, in Baszkircew’s words that, ‘There were many of them [women artists], dear gentlemen! And it is amazing considering the enormity of the difficulties they face.’

Dr Basia Sliwinska works as a Researcher at the Art History Institute of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in Portugal. Her work is situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, focusing on visual activism and artivism within transnational global frameworks. She researches aesthetic mobilisation and activation of women’s rights for social justice, women’s agency and ways of visibilising her-stories. Basia is an Associate Research Fellow at the Valand Academy (University of Gothenburg), and a Member of the Editorial Board of Third Text. In 2021 she was a Visiting Professor at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Poland. She regularly contributes to doctoral programmes at the Royal College of Art in London and the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. Recent publications include a co-edited book Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts (2022); and an edited book Feminist Visual Activism and the Body (2021).

In this paper I will discuss Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH): a UK/Ireland digital humanities project with three-year funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Irish Research Council, for which I am the UK Project Lead. FAMH will have three main strands to it: to undertake oral history collection of feminist artists and art workers from across the two islands; to collate digital records of ephemera held by the people we interview; and to work on ethical and feminist means of building such an archive and managing access. My focus will be on the methods of the project, the reasons for them, and the broader feminist, artworld, and decolonial contexts that have provoked both our research questions and our methods, which are intertwined. While FAMH is not specific to sculpture, the methodological tensions it negotiates between disciplinarity, feminist analysis/practice, and the assumptions/constraints of digital archiving we hope can inform future feminist archiving of all art practices.

Hilary Robinson is Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory, and Director, Centre for Doctoral Training: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Visual Culture, Loughborough University. She is PI for AHRC/IRC-funded Feminist Art Making Histories. Trained as a painter, her PhD was supervised by Griselda Pollock. Her employment includes: Professor of Politics of Art and Head of School, Art & Design, University of Ulster; Dean, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, USA; and Dean, Art & Design, Middlesex University. Publications include: Reading Art, Reading Irigaray (2006); Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2014 (ed., 2015); Art of Feminism (co-authored, 2018); A Companion to Feminist Art (co-ed.; 2019). She is currently working on Feminisms-Museums-Surveys: An Anthology (co-ed, 2023) and Feminism/Art: A History (2023/4).

Dr Anna Frances Douglas is a curator, researcher and educator at the University of Leeds. She is the co-investigator/curator on Hepworth’s Progeny: Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain – Lives, Work, Careers and Social Change, 1960–2021 (The Hepworth, Wakefield, 2023) with Kerry Harker. She is interested in the use of qualitative research methods in surfacing alternative narratives concerning women’s artistic practices.

This paper creates an opportunity to reflect on the journey and outcomes of the Rita Keegan Archive Project. Exploring the role and impact of networks, community, institutions, curation, finance, administration, archives and sustainability in relation to the success, barriers and challenges faced when facilitating and developing such a project. Illustrating how the space that artist Rita Keegan has carved through her curation of community, feminist, Black arts archives with a focus of creating continuity between past and future generations, has created space within the wider, mainstream heritage sector to highlight the validity of such cultural and intellectual traditions through her personal collecting and artistic practice.

Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski is an archivist and mixed media artist/designer, currently pursuing a collaborative PhD at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL / Tate Britain). Her doctoral research places much-needed critical attention on Jamaican-born sculptor Ronald Moody and his niece Cynthia Moody. She holds an MA in Archives and Record Management, International from University College London. She is a member of the Afrofeminist Transatlantic Collaboration, which maps and archives the cultural resistance of Black feminist artists in the UK and the Twins Cities. Most recently she co-edited Mirror Reflecting Darkly: The Rita Keegan Archive (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) and co-curated 20/20 [a brief survey] alongside seragraphist Aida Wilde (Truman Brewery, London, 2021). She is particularly interested in developing frameworks for interrogating what it means to advocate and/or archive diasporic archives in the twenty-first century collaboratively, sharing skills and building capacity within the heritage and memory work sector.

Since 2015 Kingston University’s Dorich House Museum, the 1930s former studio-home of the sculptor Dora Gordine (1895–1991), has operated with a mission to support and promote women’s creative practice, enacting this through residencies, creative projects and the research publication Dora: Dialogues on Women’s Creative Practice and Thinking.

Through a discussion of recent projects by contemporary artists, this paper will explore how they have helped activate the archive, situating and embedding Gordine within wider international histories. Encouraging multiple perspectives and points of engagement seems particularly fruitful in the case of sculptors such as Gordine, who resist easy categorisation or insertion into existing national art historical narratives. Born in Liepāja, Latvia, to Russian Jewish parents, Gordine lived and worked in Tallinn, Berlin, Paris, Malaysia and Singapore, holding Russian, Estonian and British citizenship before settling at Dorich House in 1936. Projects discussed will include: a documentary film by Annaleena Piel Linnå, studio residencies with artists Cathie Pilkington and Nadia Hebson, and projects with Erika Tan, Oreet Ashery and Judy Price. Approaching Gordine as practitioners, researchers and curators, their projects have brought diverse, dispersed archival materials into dialogue to explore themes of gender, race, class, motherhood, national, transnational and professional artistic identities and their mediation, decolonisation and the artist-subject relationship, offering new insights and approaches to Gordine’s work as a sculptor.

Alert to Gordine’s privileged position and the risk of creating a new but equally exclusive canon, the paper will consider the institutional context of Dorich House Museum and the potential of such a model of sustained practitioner-led enquiry to operate successfully elsewhere to highlight shared concerns, promote diverse critical perspectives, and foster more inclusive practices that embrace the lives and work of other marginalised women sculptors.

Fiona Fisher is the curator of Kingston University’s Dorich House Museum, the 1930s former studio-home of the sculptor Dora Gordine (1895–1991) and her husband Richard Hare (1907–1966). She is a member of the University’s Modern Interiors Research Centre and in her curatorial role co-edits Dora: Dialogues on Women’s Creative Practice and Thinking. Her research interests include the design of twentieth-century British domestic interiors, with a focus on sites of creative practice, collection and display, and the design of the modern public house with reference to English national identity and evolving relationships of public, private and commercial space. Her research has been published in journals including The London Journal, Visual Resources and Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes and her publications include Designing the British Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood, 1948–1968 (2015) and the co-edited collection The Routledge Companion to Design Studies (2016).

Rosamund Lily West is a curator, writer and historian. Having previously worked as Paul Mellon Research Curator at the Royal Society of Sculptors, Rosamund currently works as Documentary Curator at London Transport Museum, a role which involves documenting contemporary London. Rosamund is also writing up her part-time PhD, ‘The ‘concrete citizens’ of the London County Council’s housing schemes, 1943 to 1965’ on the London County Council’s post-war public sculptures at Kingston University.

I propose to present my project, Women Artists of the North East Library (WANE, 2017–) as a performative lecture, reciting the words and images of artists working with sculpture in the collection. The WANE Library brings together research and donated material including publications, audio, images and other forms of documentation to form a cultural resource that contributes to the history of women-identifying artists working in the North East of England.

The WANE Library is a growing archive of over 300 items containing exhibition leaflets, posters, catalogues, artists’ books, newsletters, performance scripts, anthologies and monographs as well as personal notes and photocopies related to a vast and variable history of women’s artistic practices and exhibition making connected to the region. I will select text and images from artists I see as complicating the categories, ‘sculptor’ and ‘North East’ to explore the questions: ‘can we trace the legacies of artists who have spent time in, studied, taught or exhibited in the region?’ and ‘how do we offer a re-appraisal of artists less visible in current narratives but whom have historically impacted the region?’

By presenting WANE library materials connected to artists working with sculpture, considering their other roles, as writers, students, teachers, I hope to connect with Felicity Allen’s notion of the ‘disoeuvre’, considering their ‘artistic work’ as expansive, affective beyond the materiality of the physical art they produce, as well as offer an alternative geographical gaze through which to view their artist careers.

Holly Argent is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her work is interested in creating contexts and perspectives for exploring artistic legacies and conflicting histories. Often working with archives and ostensibly unrelated materials, she is always looking to reconfigure and emphasise a subjective position to reflect or expand upon complex autobiographical narratives. This work can take shape as performance, text, sculpture and video. Performative lectures/screenings are often a way for her to explore a connection or correspondence with the works of other women artists. She has previously presented a performative-lecture with work of the Polish artistic duo KwieKulik (1971–87) at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (2019) and a performative-screening with the work of Tamara Krikorian at Northumbria University Cinema (2022). She founded and leads the Women Artists of the North East Library (2017–), was the 2021 BALTIC Bothy artist in residence on the Isle of Eigg, Scotland. She has also shown work at Grand Union, Birmingham, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, and CGP, London. She has received funding from Arts Council England, Paul Mellon Centre, CVAN and A-N.

Historically in the UK, the collecting of Chinese art and objects has revolved around a narrow and homogenising preconception of ‘Chineseness’ centred on evoking exoticism and fetish. The site of art collections are fraught with nation-state notions of identity and constructs a Chinese identity as orientating from a geographically bound ‘China’ and overlooks the nuanced definitions of a diasporic Sinophone/Chinese expression in Britain. The lived experiences of Chinese/Sinophone communities have been greatly overlooked and under-represented which has been described as ‘invisible’ in public discourse (Parker, 1998), this invisibility contrasts with the hypervisibility of Chinese aesthetics prevalent in Chinatowns, museum practices in the UK, the appropriation of Chinese aesthetics in European art and its influence in visual culture.

To offer a critical counter narrative, this conference paper highlights the methodological significance of applying a sculptural sensibility in ethnographic centred work. As an artist-researcher and as a part of my PhD fieldwork, I collaborated with thirty British Chinese women to create a bilingual art school over a series of eight months at Haringey Chinese Community Centre. Methodologically, this research builds on principles of sculpture in the expanded field and combines ethnographic, experimental material workshops and life story interviews as a two-pronged approach to explore their lives as lived and imagined by British Chinese women.

In this way, everyday British Chinese women contributed towards a visual and critical critique of their otherness through the process of embodied making and the possibilities of community building through adopting sculptural methodologies. The material from this research exists as a visual archive on www.objectstories.co.uk. These decentred insights offer a much needed counter narrative to the representation of Sinophone/Chinese culture in the British museum canon to present a decolonial position of bodies and positions.

Dr Denise Kwan is a practising artist, researcher and writer. She teaches as a Lecturer on at Camberwell University of the Arts London on the Fine Art Sculpture programme and is a Senior Lecturer at Bristol University of the West of England. Denise completed her PhD from the University of Westminster, London 2016–2019. With a background in sculpture (University of Brighton) and curating (Royal College of Art), her practice and research explores the interdisciplinary crossovers between migration, materiality, social practice and ethnography. The creation of alternative spaces and communities through making is a reoccurring theme. Working with ideas of embodiment in context of the Chinese diaspora, her PhD research at the University of Westminster explored the use social practice and material culture with two generations of British Chinese women (2019) to create a bilingual Cantonese English art school at Haringey Chinese Community Centre. This project curated into a digital platform on www.objectstories.co.uk funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, Language Acts and Worldmaking. Subsequently this research project was recognised by the Early Careers’ researcher award from British Journal of Chinese Studies. Denise has been particularly interested in the potential of community building through art making where the work typically arises in domestic, community and digital spaces. In response to the anti-Asian racism incited by Covid-19, she facilitated a series of digital zine making workshops entitled A Zine of Collective Care. She co-organised the first academic workshop exploring the experiences of British Chinese women at Kings College (2018). She has presented her research at Wuyi University Guangdong (China) and at the Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference (UK). Her writing and research has been featured on arts platform including ArtReview and was selected for the inaugural Art Criticism Prize by BREESELITTLE London and Harmonious Society Award for Art Criticism, Manchester.

As Clare Hemmings has written all histories are ‘selective and motivated’, our understanding of feminism created by stories that contain within them the politics of the storyteller as much as – if not more than – the history that they recount. Archives too have been thought of in terms of the politics of their selection, what they leave out often saying as much about the institutions that hold them as the documents they contain. In this paper, I am going to consider how the selective and motivated archive can be understood when it is maintained and promoted by women artists themselves, using as my case study the documents that would eventually become the Lucy Lippard Women Artists’ Registry papers at Rutgers University Library. Recording the work of the activism that came out of the early moments of the women artists’ movement in New York, this archive was created and kept in order to build a history of women’s art, offering insight into not only activism but also the range of work that was being made during the 1970s.

Thinking particularly about the collection of slides that had formed part of the Women’s Art Registry, I will consider how archival gestures sought ways to address the marginalisation of women from particular narratives of art – including those that associated monumental, sculptural, and innovative work with masculinity – by creating a form that could educate and advocate for women working in a range of media. Drawing on this as a way to consider the recent translation of this archive from a deliberate act of self-advocacy and documentation to one which sits within an institution as a record for consultation, I will ask what stories the archive suggests, what politics lie within its selection, and consider the implications for writing its feminist art history.

Rachel Warriner is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research focuses on the important contribution of activist collectives to the American feminist art movement during the 1970s. She has published on feminist art and poetry in The Irish University Review, Courtauld Books Online, Muße, and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and her book Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art is forthcoming from I.B. Tauris. She co-founded and organises the Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group.

Dr Kerry Harker is Curatorial Researcher at The Hepworth Wakefield, working jointly with Dr Anna Frances Douglas on Hepworth’s Progeny. Subtitled Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain – Lives, Work, Careers and Social Change, 1960–2021, the project is hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield in collaboration with art historian Griselda Pollock and sculptor Lorna Green, and will lead to an exhibition and events at the gallery in Spring 2023.