Feminist Histories of the Future

This reading emerges from the exhibition Les Praticiennes, that draws on the work of 15 women sculptors in Fin de siècle Paris, often associated with Rodin.  The writing will imagine these artists’ voice at different moments of their lives, drawing on archival material, but embellished with the speculation and fabrication.

Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic. In 2019 she was Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, developing her painting project, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter. She was the 2022 Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute.

This presentation will reposition Mary Somerville (1780-1872) as a protophotographer and pioneer of colour photography. Using archival correspondence, published work and experiments, it will move across photography, writing and creative archival research processes to work cross-historically, re-touching the archive, to recover and repair a marginalised history.

Caroline Douglas is an artist working with photography. Alongside her teaching at the Glasgow School of Art, she is currently undertaking a PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art, Retouching the Archive: Gender and Class in Early Photography in Scotland.

A performative lecture reflecting on the legacy of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.

Through a practice of performative, poetic and fictive writing and a method Marita describes as a “speaking with”, we will come close to Margaret Macdonald’s work for Fritz Waerndorfer’s Viennese private music room commissioned in 1902, very little of which remains today.

Marita Fraser is an artist, writer and researcher who exhibits internationally with institutions including Kunsthaus Vienna, Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2016 she was artist in resident at Museums Quartier Vienna (Q21). She holds a PhD in Fine Art Practice from the Royal College of Art.

This reading looks for the figure, or specific and undetermined presence, at the heart of a work by the late interior designer Janette Laverrière. Following the unique folded structure and conflicting origin stories of Laverrière’s Desk for the Ambassador’s Wife (1956), the figure in the work becomes a kind of pact or fix or seal between writer and subject.

Amelia Stein is a writer, editor, and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. She writes regularly on art for exhibitions and catalogues, including on the work of Elisabeth Kley, Rebecca Fortnum, Siobhan Liddell, Matt Connors, and others.

This paper draws upon ‘Glean: Early 20^th century women filmmakers and photographers in Scotland’ at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, which brought together 125 works by 14 women from 17 archives. Rather than presenting a homogeneous narrative – or the women’s biographies over-shadowing their work – the exhibition sought to retain complexities and the diverse motivations behind their oeuvres. Thise paper looks at curatorial research methods used to develop such an approach.

Jenny Brownrigg is Exhibitions Director at The Glasgow School of Art. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Scottish women artists. She is curator of ‘Glean: early 2oth century women filmmakers and photographers in Scotland’. Previous curated exhibitions include ‘Franki Raffles: Observing Women at Work’,  in 2017 at Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art.

This performative video-essay by Sarah Forrest and Laura Haynes on the manner of ‘distance from’ and ‘closeness to’ in the work and biography of Scottish poet and filmmaker, Margaret Tait (b. 1918-1999). This work was developed following research undertaken into the correspondence and diaries of Margaret Tait held in the Margaret Tait Archives at Orkney Library, Kirkwall, and was supported by MAP’s ‘Footnoting the Archives’ series and Dr Sarah Neely.

Dr Laura Haynes is a writer, editor and the Programme Leader of MLitt Art Writing in the School of Fine Art. Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique.

Dr Sarah Forrest is an artist and researcher and holds a SAGSA post-doctoral fellowship.

An audio performance foregrounding a fictional day in the life narrative set in a recent past. Based on the life of Margaret Benyon, artist, educator, pioneer of holography and the first artist to make a hologram. Following the development of laser technology via laboratory, art institution, and home garage studio.

Anne-Marie Copestake is an artist working across media. Attentive to temporary and longer-term communities, her work is concerned with entangled social political conditions surrounding individual and collective choices, or a lack of choices, and an exploration of environments that may contribute essentially to these conditions.

This Performance Lecture will consider and reconsider aspects of Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel in relation to biographical details unearthed from the archives of The National Library of Scotland and non-binary ways of thinking.

Jane Toppingis a Scottish artist and academic, currently Lecturer on the MLitt Fine Art Practice programme at Glasgow School of Art. Her interdisciplinary practice meddles with science fiction, the archive, the screen and the life and works of writers including Naomi Mitchison.

This paper will begin the process of historical recovery of Daphne Dyce Sharp. Both her artwork and her contribution to artist-run culture is relatively unknown. She was sculptor and founder of Edinburgh’s ‘57 Gallery, yet she has not been accorded the recognition she warrants. Dyce-Sharp’s contribution, if acknowledged at all, has been relegated to the footnotes of ARI culture.

Deborah Jackson is a writer, artist-curator and academic. Across her work she examines how our future’s cultural roots are determined, who gets to ‘make’ our cultural products, who gets credited, legitimized or excluded. She is the Head of Fine Art Critical Theory (FACS) as Glasgow School of Art

This presentation considers forms of refusal, present in both public and private forms of writing produced by the artist Lee Lozano. Strike, Boycott and Dropout are written works that mark a process of redefining contact and loss, investigating degrees of closeness and disappearance to discuss contexts of resistance in the everyday.

Karen Di Franco is Programme Leader, MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at Glasgow School of Art and Programme Curator at Chelsea Space, Chelsea College of Arts. She is currently working on a solo exhibition of American artist Constance DeJong.

This paper examines the work of Lys Hansen, contextualising her work within figurative painter in Scotland in the mid-to-late twentieth century. It focusses on her journey as a woman painting, uncovering how her family life and history of migration has influenced her art, and how the reception of her work has been defined by her gender.

Marianne Greated is Reader in Painting and currently Academic Development Lead at Glasgow School of Art. Her research interests explore how painting responds to environmental and social justice, with exhibitions including solo shows in India, China, Greece, Denmark, Belarus and the UK.