Self-organisation, friendship, collaboration, acts of resistance: a genealogy of feminist-led and women-led artist initiatives dedicated to social justice and activism in the island of Ireland

Abstract

The Irish Women Artist Group, the Northern Irish Women Artists Group and the Women Artists Action Group were three advocacy groups founded in the late 80s in London, Belfast, and Dublin, which activities span from 1986 till 1991. Rooted at the local level and consciously allied with the international social movements, these artists-led initiatives aimed to establish a new community of women artists, creating exhibitions opportunities and initiating political discourses around the conditions of women - giving their struggle visibility and credibility, outside their own community circles. Their names and herstories still occupy a marginal - if not inexistent - place in the current literature on the island of Ireland artist-led collective history and the intersectional feminist scholarship; in contrast with the fact that many of the artists involved in these groups at the start of their career are now established and internationally recognised arts professionals. This practice based research fills this gap, articulating for the first time the crucial role played by Irish feminist led and women-led advocacy groups; with the objective of reclaiming these for-too-long overlooked herstories, while disseminating the research findings through an experimental web platform and a printed publication. Informed by a layering methodology, which encompass an array of feminist-informed and artist-led methods such as self-organisation, friendship, collaboration, and resistance; the study avails of selected interviews with key artists and arts professionals directly involved in the case studies, giving them agency on the narration of their own lived experience. The research draws attention on the power of activating artists/activists’ archival materials as a necessary strategy to tell herstories, validating personal experiences and complex political and cultural identities, thus challenging discourses of exclusion and omissions. This PhD marks the beginning of an exhaustive, multifaceted, feminist-informed scholarship on collaborative artistic practices, within and beyond the island of Ireland’s geographical boundaries.

Date of Award	May 2024
Original language	English
Supervisor	Cherie Driver (Supervisor)