#event…’Going Public: Late Victorian Women, Identity and Space’

Dr Lynne Walker of the Institute of Historical Research

‘Going Public: Late Victorian Women, Identity and Space’

6.00, 13 March in TRIARC (The Irish Art Research Centre, TCD), Provost’s Stables (go to Arts Block, basement level, to the back of the building, out the back door and follow signs).

Lynne Walker set up and now runs the course, An Introduction to Visual Sources for Historians, at the IHR and contributes to the MA in Contemporary British History at the CCBH.

Research and publications
She is writing a history of gender, space and architecture in Britain
(17 th century to the present) and her current research interests also include “Women and Church Art” (Sage, forthcoming), as well as a special study of “Lady Anne Clifford” (Lund Humphries, forthcoming).

Books
Drawing on Diversity ( London , 1997); as editor and author
Women Architects: Their Work ( London , 1984)
Cracks in the Pavement ( London , 1992)
As editor, William Morris ( Madrid , 1984).
Articles
“Political Pincushions: decorating the abolitionist interior”
(Manchester, 1999 with Vron Ware)
“Home and Away: The Feminist Mapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London” (in The Unknown City, Cambridge MA/London, 2001)
“Women Patron Builders in Britain: identity, difference and memory in spatial and material culture”( Local/Global , Aldershot, 2006) “Locating the Global/Rethinking the Local: Suffrage Politics, Architecture and Space” ( Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2006).

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#fridayfocus…Mary Swanzy – The Post-Cubist Paintings

Analyzing Cubism, IMMA’s latest exhibition, brings fresh and renewed focus to a number of Irish artists working in a Cubist idiom through the twentieth century. Among those included is Mary Swanzy (1882 – 1978), who was among the first generation of Irish women artists to travel to Paris, where she immersed herself in art, both in terms of education and her social life. From a young age, Swanzy had travelled widely and this was something she maintained through her life; visiting Czechoslovakia, where her sister worked with the Red Cross during the First World War, and Yugoslavia, before travelling on to Honolulu, Samoa and California in the 1920s. After this, the artist settled in London, returning to Ireland for a short time during the Second World War.

Like many artists of this period, Swanzy worked with different representational styles during her career, moving through different phases. For me, some of her most interesting work post-dates that in the IMMA exhibition, and is altogether darker and more questioning of human life. Here’s just a few examples of this work, it is included in some national collections and the Pym Gallery have produced some well illustrated catalogues that include these later paintings.

Swans, c.1930, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

© The Artist's EstateAllegory,c.1945 – 49, National Gallery of Ireland.

Hindu Ascetic, date unknown, private collection.