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Virginia Woolf installation by Norwegian artist opens @fgcu

Posted in 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, art, art exhibits, short stories, tagged , , , , on Saturday 25 February 2023| Leave a Comment »

Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Ane Thon Knutsen is at it again — at combining Virginia Woolf and the letterpress, that is.

This time, the Oslo Academy of the Arts professor has debuted her installation, “Printed Words: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf,” at University Archives and Special Collections at the Florida Gulf Coast University library.

The Feb. 23 opening reception introduced the installation, which will be on display from now through the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf:
Virginia  Woolf and Ecologies, June 8-11. Registration opens in March.

In “Printed Works,” the self-taught typesetter who has exhibited other letterpress projects and installations related to Woolf, adapts a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories.

“Knutsen’s artistic research aims to point out the influence typography, particularly typesetting, might have on the content of the text. It speaks to the power of designing and publishing one’s own work,” notes the FGCU Special Collections and Archives website.

Her first Woolf project: a book

In “A Printing Press of One’s Own,” which premiered at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf” at the University of Reading, England, in 2017, Ane produced a hand-set volume that includes Ane’s personal essay about her experience finding a space of her own in which she could pursue her passion — typesetting.

Ane Thon Knutsen with her hand-printed volume introduced at the 2017 Woolf conference, “A Printing Press of One’s Own”

According to Ane, “The book is an essay referring to A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf. The essay reflects upon women’s role in letterpress, and the importance of a room of one’s own in artistic practices.

“In this book I am investigating the first books printed by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, both in practice and in the written ‘dialogue’ between Virginia Woolf and myself, as we are both self-taught typesetters.”

Her second: up on the walls

In the winter of 2019, Ane had a major installation of Woolf’s first short story, “The Mark on the Wall,” (1917) in Kunstnernes Hus, an art institution in the centre of Oslo.

As described by Nell Toemen, who visited the exhibit and shared her thoughts with Blogging Woolf, Woolf’s story was “handprinted on I don’t know how many papers, white and off-white, neatly arranged so as to fill all the walls. If you would walk the room in eleven rounds you would be able to read the whole story. Reading it this way is an absolutely different experience than reading the story in a book.”

Page 2 of the “On Being Ill” project

Her third: via Instagram

In March of 2020, as lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, Ane used her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill,“ Woolf’s 1930 essay.

She shared each page on Instagram and she shared her thoughts about the project with Blogging Woolf.

At the time, she said she was using her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill” “until we can go back to normal. I hope I will not make it through, as we’re counting about 140 sentences, and the paper is restricted to leftovers from my stock.”

About Ane Thon Knutsen

Ane is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts has won numerous awards for her work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.

 

 

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Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury arrive in Rome

Posted in art exhibits, events, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , , on Wednesday 9 November 2022| Leave a Comment »

Last week, we brought you news of a Virginia Woolf exhibit in New York City. This week, we bring you news of the arrival of a Woolf and Bloomsbury exhibit in Rome.

The exhibit, “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: Inventing Life,” opened in Rome Oct. 26 and will be at the National Roman Museum Palazzo Altemps through Feb. 12, 2023.

The exhibit is housed in five rooms of the Palazzo Altemps, each corresponding to a different section. It begins with a space dedicated to the meetings of Woolf and the Bloomsbury group at 46 Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury district of London, where Virginia and Vanessa Stephen met with group members such as John Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant. Other spaces in the exhibit reconstruct the history of the Hogarth Press and recall the six years of the Omega Workshop.

Edited by Woolf scholar Nadia Fusini in collaboration with playwright and performance artist Luca Scarlini, the exhibit is a project of the National Roman Museum and the Electa publishing house, created in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London and with the support of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society., which also sponsored an all-night reading of Woolf on Nov. 5.

The Palazzo Altemps is a fitting choice for the exhibit, as it once hosted a library collected between the end of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as prestigious nineteenth century literary salons.

Tickets for the exhibit can be purchased online.

Above: the exhibition catalog published by Electa, which is constructed as an intimate diary, a notebook of notes and memories.

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Charleston attic opens to visitors with “Near Heaven” exhibit

Posted in art exhibits, Charleston Farmhouse, events, Vanessa Bell, tagged , , on Saturday 9 April 2022| Leave a Comment »

You can see two of the attic windows in this photo of Charleston taken in 2019.

I have been fascinated by attics since I was a little girl, when the bed in my childhood bedroom bumped up against the door to our home’s attic, where family treasures were left to collect dust.

Now, visitors to Charleston have the rare opportunity to visit that home’s attic, the former studio of Vanessa Bell and the site of a new free exhibit, “Near Heaven.” The title comes from a quote from Vanessa’s daughter Angelica Garnett, in which she explained how important the attic space was to her mother.

A steep climb to a place of escape

After a climb up two flights of steep and uneven steps, visitors can view this new exhibit by Langlands & Bell. It is billed as “exploring the space as an artistic refuge and a place of escape” and contemplation from the domestic demands Vanessa faced.

Lord knows they were many and pressing. Her letters housed in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library show the many domestic concerns Vanessa had to juggle — living arrangements, house guests, child rearing, and personality conflicts — all while creating art.

While entry to the free exhibit does not include a tour of the home itself or its other exhibitions, visitors can get a view of the home’s famous garden from the attic windows.

How to book

“Near Heaven” is the first contemporary exhibit ever to be installed at the house. While free, it does require booking a specific time slot. The exhibit is open from April 2 through Aug. 29. 

Charleston is based in the heart of the South Downs National Park in East Sussex, UK.

Another exterior view of Charleston, 2019

 

 

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See the faces of Bloomsbury Group at Sheffield Museum

Posted in art, art exhibits, Bloomsbury, events, tagged , on Sunday 14 November 2021| Leave a Comment »

So many wonderful events, performances, and exhibits related to the Bloomsbury Group take place in England. Here is another I wish I could view — and it’s free. “Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy,” an exhibit that chronicles the “lives, loves and work” of the group opens at the Millennium Gallery of the Sheffield Museums Nov. 25 and runs until Feb. 13, 2022.

The Vanessa Bell portrait of Leonard Woolf that graces the cover of his biography by Victoria Glendinning is just one of the Bloomsbury Group portraits included in the exhibit.

Curated through a partnership between Sheffield Museums, York Museums Trust and the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition includes portraits of those who were intimately associated with the Bloomsbury Group, along with their peripheral friends and colleagues.

More than 140 works

Beyond Bloomsbury brings together more than 140 paintings, sculpture, works on paper and supporting material to celebrate key figures, including Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Most of the portraits included in the exhibit are informal and intimate.

It include paintings by Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, sculpture by Marcel Gimmond and Stephen Tomlin, and drawings and photographs by Cecil Beaton, George Charles Beresford, Lady Ottoline Morrell and John Nash.

Get introduced at a tour

The gallery is offering two free lunchtime tours to introduce viewers to the exhibit. Titled “Beyond Bloomsbury,” they will be held from 1-1:45 p.m. on Dec. 7 and Dec. 14.

Sheffield Museums are located at Arundel Gate, Sheffield S1 2PP.

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Pandemic photos show Angel in the House lives on

Posted in art, art exhibits, coronavirus, essays, pandemic, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Tuesday 14 September 2021| 1 Comment »

Have we killed the self-sacrificing Angel in the House? If an exhibit by photographer Lanie McNulty is to be believed, the answer is no.

Virginia Woolf advocated for such a death. In “Professions for Women” read to the Women’s Service League in 1931 and published posthumously in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), she wrote that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”

A woman writer, she believed, had to kill off the respectable Victorian “angel,” popularized by Coventry Patmore in his 1858 poem. The angel, an ideal woman who lives to serve others, particularly males, neglects her own personal needs and certainly never considers herself to have any professional aspirations.

Pandemic forces women into angel roles

McNulty, a New York based photographer and social activist, was inspired by the current pandemic to turn her lens on domestic interiors. In doing so, she produced stunning photographs that depict women at home alone and with children, husbands, parents, and friends.

Created in collaboration with her subjects, McNulty’s photographs starkly expose what the pandemic year has made clearer than ever — that women play an outsized role trying to keep it all together. Her photos make up the exhibit “The Angel in the House.”

McNulty is not the first to make a play on the death of the angel for an artistic purpose. A literary journal titled Killing the Angel (pictured above) launched in 2013 but now appears to be defunct.

Exhibit and book

Now on display at New York’s Planthouse, The Angel in the House opened today and runs through Oct. 23 by appointment.

If you can’t make it to the exhibit, you can buy the book.

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