Five Sheets at Five Years

Exhibition at Five Years Gallery with Dr. Katharine Meynell. five sheets at Five Years presents the latest section from Poetry of Unknown Words, our feminising response to Iliazd’s Poesie de mots inconnus, 1949. This is a series of transcriptions using an expanded sense of authorship and relationships with others through time. Winter 2012 we walk to Dulwich Park, site of the stolen Barbara Hepworth Two Forms (Divided Circle). Take note of its absence. Print image of recently missing sculpture covered in bright blue plastic sheeting and cordoned off with orange netting. Verso, delicate paper collaged texts (Bernard MT Condensed type) describe vandalisms of BH work dating from the 1960’s. Internet trawl for architects throws up Ethel Mary Charles 1871–1962 first woman member of RIBA. Never heard of her. Go to library. Intrigued by her radical text A Plea for Women Practicing Architecture presented to the fortnightly meeting of the Architectural Association 1902. Reproduce and fold down big and bulky. Verso, shit-brown pochoir of earth closet from EMC drawings for labourers’ cottages Wykehamica 1895. Lucie Rie, transcription from pot to page. Hand burnish a log off the wood-pile, shape of cross-section suggests a vessel. Wood-ring markings resemble pottery sgrafitto. Print airmail in the garden. Verso rubbings with silver, bronze and graphite of buttons (ref. LR button moulds circa 1941–1947) use our button collection (again). ZENOBIA IN CHAINS, Harriet Hosmer sculpture ‘missing’ (rediscovered 2008 in a garden, sold at Sothebys to Huntington Library). Reflects a political zeitgeist - the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women. “a conventional treatment of drapery in a tasteless modern Italian style, a low kind of thing…”. Verso, H.H. had close relationship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Rome, Aurora Leigh (1856) informed by this friendship. Examine Eileen Gray stencils and process notebooks at Blythe House, recipes for lacquers etc. Stenciled wall texts from her neglected E1027 (1929) letter-pressed with polymer plates. Sheets hinged with Chiyogami gold patterned paper reference EG screen in the V&A collection. Wrapper, black glassine with EG’s handwriting. http://www.gefnpress.co.uk http://www.katharinemeynell.co.u

The Power and Promise of Developmental Systems Theory

I argue that it is time for many feminists to rethink their attitudes towards evolutionary biology, not because feminists have been wrong to be deeply sceptical about many of its claims, both explicit and implicit, but because biology itself has changed. A new appreciation for the importance of development in biology has become mainstream and a new ontology, associated with developmental systems theory (DST), has been introduced over the last two decades. This turn challenges some of the features of evolutionary biology that have most troubled feminists. DST undermines the idea of biologicales sence and challenges both nature /nurture and nature/culture distinctions. Freed from these conceptual constraints, evolutionary biology no longer poses the problems that have justified feminist scepticism. Indeed, feminists have already found useful applications for DST and I argue that they should expand their use of DST to support more radical and wide-ranging political theories.Si les féministes n’ont pas eu tort d’être profondément sceptiques face aux nombreuses revendications de la biologie, leur attitude face à cette science doit être remise en question car la biologie s’est transformée au courant des dernières décennies. La «théorie des systèmes de développement» (developmental systems theory-TDS) est une théorie qui s’est considérablement développée et qui a pris beaucoup d’ampleur. Cette théorie n’accepte pas le concept d’essence biologique ce qui pose un défi important à la distinction nature/culture. Une des conséquences de cet apport théorique est que le scepticisme des féministes face à la biologie de l’évolution n’est plus justifié car la biologie ne comporte plus les contraintes essentialistes qui s’avéraient contentieuses. En effet, certaines féministes ont déjà trouvé des applications utiles pour la TDS et nous avançons que les féministes doivent maintenant élargir l’utilisation de la TDS car la porté de celle-ci pourrait être significative dans d’autres domaines tel celui de la théorie politique

Romanness and Islam: collective Roman identity in Byzantium from the seventh to the tenth century

The thesis seeks to engage with ongoing historiographical debates over the nature of Roman identity in the Byzantine Empire. It aims to circumvent debates over the ethnic or national character of Romanness in Byzantium by focusing on the fluid nature of the boundaries of collective identities to isolate the core qualities that defined the group at its most expansive — which generally occurs in relation to an external ‘other’. To that end, the thesis is divided into two broad sections. The first examines the underpinnings of Romanness in Byzantium in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, immediately prior to the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests. It concludes that the defining features of Roman group identity, sine qua non, were adherence to Christianity and an acceptance of the legitimacy of Roman imperial power, vested in the person of the reigning emperor in Constantinople. In this regard, whilst there existed a normative discourse of Romanness in the form of the Chalcedonian Hellenophones that made up the majority of the empire’s elite group, this did not preclude non-Chalcedonians or non-Greek-speakers from considering themselves Roman or being considered as such by others. The second section takes a diachronic view of how Romanness interacted with the rise of Islam from the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the tenth. Knowledge of Islamic theology spread to the empire gradually over the span of two centuries, resulting in the formation of a particular image of Islam and its practitioners within the empire’s discourse that served a particular socio-cultural function. In short, Islam in Byzantium was constructed in such a way to act as a mirror to Romanness to express the collective identity of the people in the empire and define those who were perceived as ‘non-Roman’

The Shepherdess : A Secular Song

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-me/1840/thumbnail.jp