In the Firing Line: women war artists, materiality and gendered remembrance of war

我的研究探讨女性战争艺术家和他们的工作和接近冲突地区的记忆，这些妇女创造的形象，并继续创造，以应对他们的经验，以及权力，机构和意识形态的结构如何影响他们的工作。我的项目探讨了如何记忆和物质之间的亲密对话，在研究不足，往往隐藏的历史和当代的草图和冲突的图纸，由英国，加拿大和澳大利亚的官方和非官方的女性战争艺术家创造，丰富本土的文化记忆和战争纪念品。我的项目集中在1914年至2014年期间由女性战争艺术家创作的图像，包括Olive Maude-Cooke和Iso Rae（第一次世界大战），玛丽凯塞尔和Ethel Gabain（第二次世界大战），琳达基特森（福克兰群岛冲突），以及格特鲁德卡恩斯和朱莉娅米奇利（联合国国际安全援助部队部署到阿富汗）的作品，并辅以其他艺术家创作的小型作品甚至单个图像。我采用这些素描和绘画在挑战周围的冲突环境中流行的父权话语的争议，战争艺术是一种男性化的艺术流派，并通过重新概念化的心理空间，包括妇女的冲突区，而不是物理地理定义的，完全男性化的空间。因此，我的目标是揭露女性战争艺术家及其对女性冲突经历和贡献的物质表现，并在此过程中将她们的话语重新定位在关于战争的本土文化记忆的前沿和中心。本项目采用性别和空间的方法，创新地结合了传统和当代艺术史和记忆研究的方法，创建一个关键的框架，通过它来概念化记忆和物质性。通过整合这些学科，这种方法将展示艺术史方法对文化记忆研究的价值，并为当前记忆研究方法论的争论做出贡献。

My research explores women war artists and their memories of working in and close to conflict zones, the images these women have created and continue to create in response to their experiences, and how the structures of authority, institutions and ideologies influence their work. My project examines how the intimate dialogue between remembrance and materiality evident in under-researched and often hidden historic and contemporary sketches and drawings of conflict, created by British, Canadian and Australian official and unofficial women war artists, enrich vernacular cultural memories and imaginaries of war. My project focusses on images created by women war artists between 1914 and 2014, including work by Olive Maude-Cooke and Iso Rae (World War One), Mary Kessell and Ethel Gabain (World War Two), Linda Kitson (Falklands Conflict), and Gertrude Kearns and Julia Midgley (UN ISAF deployment to Afghanistan), and supplemented by small bodies of work or even single images created by other artists. I employ these sketches and drawings in challenging the prevailing patriarchal discourse surrounding conflict environments by disputing the established art historical notion that war art is a masculinised artistic genre, and by reconceptualising conflict zones as psychological spaces inclusive to women, as opposed to physically-geographically defined, exclusively masculine spaces. Thus, I aim to expose women war artists and their material representations of women's experience of and contribution to conflict, and in so doing reposition their discourse at the front and centre of vernacular cultural memories of war.Taking a gendered and spatial approach, this project innovatively combines methods from traditional and contemporary Art History and Memory Studies, creating a critical framework by which to conceptualise remembrance and materiality. By uniting these disciplines, this approach will demonstrate the value of art historical methods for the study of cultural memory; and make a contribution to the current Memory Studies methodology debate.