Performative Self-Portraiture, Femmage, and Feminist Histories of Irish Art: Amanda Coogan’s Snails, after Alice Maher (2010)

In 2010 Amanda Coogan’s Snails: after Alice Maher was performed in front of an audience at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The two-hour performance, during which the artist stood motionless as a number of snails explored her face, body and hair, engaged with concerns of spectacle, abjection and female identity now familiar from Coogan’s practice. The artist has also explicitly acknowledged the relationship between self-portraiture and the use of the body in performance art; Snails investigates this territory through aspects of both the staging of the performance and its subsequent documentation. However a further significant aspect of this piece is its acknowledgement of the earlier work of Alice Maher, whether in terms of similar concerns with abjection and identity or the role of both the art historical canon and the representation of the self. In this paper the acknowledgement of feminist precedent is investigated through the notion of femmage, a term here appropriated to signify the recognition of the influential role of earlier women practitioners, yet here identified also as situated within a history of the politics of the Irish female body since the 1980s. This frames a discussion of the significance of self-portraiture within Coogan’s performative practice through in two earlier works Medea (2001) and Self-Portrait as David (2003). Her practice is subsequently situated in relation to a gendered critique of the role of self-portraiture within the development of art historical canons, returning to a reading of Snails in relation to further precedents for feminist deconstructions of the idealised female body through self-representation in the work of Frida Kahlo and Hannah Wilke. Finally the discussion engages with Kristeva’s notion of “women’s time” to propose a means of reconceptualising factors of influence and affirmation between women artists that cannot be recognised within the canon, concluding with discussion of works by Alice Maher as precedent for Coogan’s performative self-portraiture, and which also operate within the kind of signifying space proposed by Kristeva, an investigative process that suggests further possibilities for the writing of Irish feminist art histories

The time of Irish art

How might an understanding of the temporal help us to engage with the visual? To what extent is this mediated by a sense of location – in this case within (or about) Ireland? This thesis takes the form of an enquiry into the meanings of time in relation to Irish art over a period of approximately one hundred years from 1910 onwards. Rather than a focus on the production of meaning within artworks themselves, however, the thesis is concerned with art historiography – an investigation into the wider discursive content of a selection of my published work between 2013-2018. In doing so it establishes a critical and distinctive position for the importance of time and temporality not just in relation to the broader field of art history, but within a wider understanding of the historical formations of Irish visualities. To achieve this, I focus on the deconstruction of selected notions of temporality within the discourses of art history (the role of linear histories, canons and contemporaneity) in conjunction with an analysis of the specificity of Irish temporalities. This takes two forms: evidencing the uneven experience of modernity and the active presences of traumatic memory, both legacies of colonialism, as a means of undoing the progressive drive of linear history, and an accompanying analysis of the complex temporalities of post-conflict Northern Ireland, as a means of more specifically situating how art historical writing can produce the meanings of its artworks in both locations. Finally, in conjunction with a return to the written work submitted to accompany this thesis, I map out further directions this can take, as a means of understanding the crucial role of past modes of temporalities in an engagement with the present and an attempt to shape the future

Women in Long Kesh/Maze prison: We Were There (2014), memory and visuality

This essay focuses on issues raised by the film We Were There: The Women of Long Kesh / The Maze Prison directed by Laura Aguiar using the resources of the Prison Memory Archive (PMA) now held by the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. As a former Art History tutor for the Open University in Northern Ireland I taught several students in the prison during the late 1980s-early 1990s. What I learned from that experience had a profound effect not only on my understanding of the effects of political conflict in Northern Ireland, but on my knowledge of the role of vision and visuality within a gendered environment. My account of this period, recorded during a visit to the former prison in 2007, became part of the Archive’s holdings. An edited version was selected for inclusion in We Were There. Reflection on both my involvement with the film and the PMA becomes a a catalyst for an autoethnographic exploration of a gendered encounter with the Maze prison: what it was like, as a woman, to briefly inhabit these institutional spaces, and how their visualisation challenges existing narratives around the gendering of conflict and postconflict experience

Stormy Weather: textile art, water and climate emergency

This paper entwines the voices of art historian Dr. Fionna Barber and Artist Scholar Prof. Jools Gilson to propose the critical importance of textile art in contemporary debates about the climate emergency. Framed in collaborative counterpoint to previous work on femininity and water (notably Neimanis 2012 & 2017), this discussion focuses on three textile based projects through two meteorological exhibitions; Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map & The Tempestry Project at the Berman Museum of Art in Pennsylvannia, US and Strange Attractor at Tate St. Ives, UK, both 2021. This keynote proposes The Knitting Map as a way of thinking about textiles and climate, as well as an artwork. It visits Cork City, the Irish bog and Cornwall traversing tropes of landscape, weather and national identity as it tangles textiles analysis and story

Narratives Unfolding : National Art Histories in an Unfinished World

"Somewhere between global and local, the nation still lingers as a concept. National art histories continue to be written - some for the first time - while innovative methods and practices redraw the boundaries of these imagined communities. Narratives Unfolding considers the mobility of ideas, transnationalism, and entangled histories in essays that define new ways to see national art in ever-changing nations. " -- Publisher's website