Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast

I’ve long been fascinated by this sculpture, for many reasons, and developed a response to it in performance when invited to contribute to the Ulster Museum's major ‘Art of the Troubles’ exhibition in 2014. I had been drawing the sculpture for around 15 years, as a way of making myself look at it and think about its meanings.For this work, I visited the gallery on a number of occasions, spending several hours at a time drawing the work from different angles. As I drew, links and references occurred to me and I noted these down; visitors to the exhibition also stopped to talk about the piece and their own relationship with it. I thought of paintings by Fragonard, Boucher (also here) and Courbet, sculptural nudes from Canova to Daniel, Clésinger and Rodin, and I researched the scrapbooks and drawings of McWilliam himself, reviews of the piece that were written in the art press in the mid-1970s, and I incorporated exceprts from Baudelaire's great work on death and desire, ‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’, and from works by Seamus Heaney.McWilliam’s work combines his fascination with sexuality and sculptural form in the somewhat awkward subject of a woman being blown forcefully backward by a bomb blast. The event which drove McWilliam to make this work was the bombing of the Abercorn Tea Rooms, in Belfast, on 4 March 1972. McWilliam was born in County Down, although he left Ireland in his teens. This and the series of smaller bronzes, ‘Women of Belfast’, which he made on the same theme, are the only pieces in which McWilliam made explicit reference to the Troubles.The woman’s face is covered by a newspaper that has been blown across her face by the force of the blast. She has lost her balance, and struggles to catch hold of something. Her young, lithe limbs flail; the viewer is invited to look at her, and to enjoy looking at her, from various angles — we find ourselves looking uncomfortably up her skirt. Violence, desire, and a history of gesture are skilfully combined, but with shocking effect.The large range of visual and textual materials that I gathered together for this work are now being edited together into an artist’s book. At the moment the book sits somewhere between John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’, Aby Warburg’s ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’, and a pornographic surrealist novella.