Excavating Women's histories: nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries (1)
Thursday, 1 December 2022 at 12:00:00 am UTC
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Session Convenors
Dr Sarah Scott, The Australian National University
Dr Christina Clarke, The Australian National University
Session Speakers
Dr Sarah Scott, The Australian National University
Dr Christina Clarke, The Australian National University
Dr Helen Hughes, Monash University
Women artists and designers remain relatively unknown when compared to their male counterparts even when they were well known within their lifetimes. This is despite the publication of numerous pioneering feminist art histories including those of Cheryl Southernan and Anne Kirker in New Zealand and Joan Kerr and Jeanette Hoorne in Australia. Recent exhibitions such as ‘Know My Name’ held at the National Gallery of Australia (2021-2022) and ‘We Do this’ held at the Christchurch art gallery (2018) have addressed this lack of knowledge to some extent. However, there is still an urgent need to recover and further research these lost women, their histories and their works. This series of panels invites contributors working on women artists and designers from Australia and New Zealand to submit papers that recover these lost histories, expand known histories, or reconsider ‘the canon’ in order to include women whose opportunities within the fields of arts and ‘crafts’ were limited when compared to their male counterparts.
Excavating Women's Artists: An Introduction and Two Case Studies
Dr Sarah Scott, The Australian National University
Dr Christina Clarke, The Australian National University
This paper summarises the main themes for this session which focuses on the ways in which female creative practitioners have often been written out of history. As some of the papers in this session will show, many women have been written out of history all together. Others who are known have been sidelined. We highlight the works of Rhoda Wager, Australia’s most prolific arts and crafts jeweller, and Violet Teague, a social-minded artist who was an early visitor to the Hermannsburg Mission near Alice Springs. In the case of Wager, although her work is well known, as a practitioner in the decorative arts she has not been subject to serious art historical scholarship. Thus far, research on her work has had more of a connoisseurial focus, as is the case with Australian decorative arts more broadly. Equally, despite a major exhibition of Teague’s work which took place in 1999, further detailed consideration of her life and work is lacking. Because of the focus on the connection between Rex Batterbee and Albert Namatjira, Teagues’ extraordinary contribtuon to the Hermannsburg Mission’s wellbeing is much less well known than the story of her male counterparts.
Threadbare: Nineteenth-century Art by Convict Women
Dr Helen Hughes, Monash University
A large proportion of early settler-colonial art in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land was made by convict artists, as Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones notes in her singular book on the history of Australian convict art. Of the approximately 160,000 convicts transported to Australia, around 25,000 were women. In spite of this significant number, barely any visual art made by convict women has survived. The exceedingly well-known Rajah Quilt held in the National Gallery of Australia, which was made by unidentified convict women on the transport Rajah, is the exception that proves the rule. Many other quilts were made through Elizabeth Fry’s patchwork project for female inmates and transportees, but are presumed to have been sold for income, readily given away as a source of convict shame, or else worn down to nothing over years of use. This paper addresses the dearth in art made by convict women and the importance of recovering and further researching these ‘lost women, their histories and their works.’ It does so by focusing on convict women’s textiles, and specifically on embroidered samplers that have survived.
Biographies
Dr Sarah Scott & Dr Christina Clarke, The Australian National University
Sarah Scott and Christina Clarke are lecturers in the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory. Sarah is a historian of Australian art. She is co-editing a Routledge edited volume on cross-currents in First Nations and non-Indigenous art. Christina is a historian of metal material culture. Her current research focuses on early modern silver furnishings and Australian arts and crafts metalwork. Her monograph The Manufacture of Minoan Metal Vessels: Theory and Practice was published in 2013.
Dr Helen Hughes, Monash University
Helen Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Art History, Theory and Curatorial Practice at Monash University, where she is also Deputy Head of Fine Art. She is a founding co-editor of Discipline, Index Journal, and Memo Review.