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

我的研究探讨了女性战争艺术家和她们在冲突地区或冲突地区附近工作的记忆，这些女性创造并继续创造的图像，以回应她们的经历，以及权威、制度和意识形态的结构如何影响她们的工作。我的项目考察了记忆和物质性之间的亲密对话，这些对话在英国、加拿大和澳大利亚的官方和非官方女性战争艺术家创作的关于冲突的历史和当代素描和绘画中得到了充分的研究，往往被隐藏起来，丰富了当地文化的记忆和对战争的想象。我的项目集中于1914年至2014年间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），Mary Kessell和Ethel Gabain（第二次世界大战），Linda Kitson（福克兰群岛冲突），Gertrude Kearns和Julia Midgley（联合国国际安全援助部队部署到阿富汗）的作品，以及其他艺术家创作的小作品甚至单幅图像。我用这些草图和绘画来挑战围绕冲突环境的主流父权话语，通过质疑既定的艺术史观念，即战争艺术是一种男性化的艺术流派，并通过将冲突区域重新定义为包容女性的心理空间，而不是物理地理上定义的，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在冲突中的经历和贡献的物质表现，并以此将她们的话语重新定位于本土战争文化记忆的前沿和中心。该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，创造了一个重要的框架，通过这个框架来概念化记忆和物质性。通过将这些学科结合起来，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.