We are not always able to see original Bloomsbury art in person, but yesterday I got a look at several pieces exhibited at the Tate Britain.
Bell, Grant, Gertler
They include paintings by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister; Duncan Grant, Bell’s friend and lover who lived with her at Charleston; and Mark Gertler, who became acquainted with the Bloomsbury group through his patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell.
I share them with you here.
Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach, 1912. An oft-visited beach in Dorset by Bell and her family. Bell uses bold colors and simple shapes, rather than emphasizing the subjects. It is likely that the figures in the foreground are Vanessa’s son Julian and his nanny.
Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Based on the theme “London on Holiday,” this painting was part of the decoration for the dining room at the Borough Polytechnic.
Duncan Grant, Head of Eve, 1913. In this head of the biblical figure of Eve, grant fuses Byzantine and early Italian style with the styles of Matisse and Picasso.
Duncan Grant, Film of Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1974. This is a digital film version of a scroll painting Grant composed in 1941. The music of Bach was meant to accompany it.
Mark Gertler, The Artist’s Brother Harry Holding an Apple, 1913.
Mark Gertler, Merry-Go-Round, 1916. Gertler, a pacifist, painted this during WWI while living in London as a conscientious objector. The fairground ride is transformed from something pleasurable into a metaphor for the relentless military machine that traps both soldiers and civilians.
The whole world is a work of art – Virginia Woolf, “Moments of Being”
The interactive workshops at the 2024 Woolf conference provided a hands-on experience at the intersection of theory and practice. Conference attendees were invited to engage with Woolf’s thinking and writing in an exchange of ideas involving tactile, visual, and virtual modalities.
The two workshops highlighted in this post include the following:
Interactive Workshop A: “A Million Hands Stitch,” a craft workshop enjoining the act of reading and the practice of stitching, and
Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended,” an exhibit of graduate work in the interest of creating virtual rooms overseen by J. Ashley Foster at Fresno State University.
Conference attendee Laura Ludtke reflected on her participation in “A Million Hands Stitch” as an active practice that she incorporated into subsequent events during the conference:
Stitching as I listened to other Woolfians share their research and work made me more attentive and attuned to the intricacies and implications of their observations. I’m grateful to have attended a conference where creative and critical practices are so purposefully imbricated.
Interactive Workshop A: “A Million Hands Stitch”
By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow
“A Million Hands Stitch” was a craft workshop organized by Melissa Johnson that connected literary reading with creative practice. The workshop, as laid out in the conference booklet, promotes experimentation “with various kinds of making centered in text and textile.”
Melissa Johnson’s thread box at the “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.
An assortment of tools were offered at the workshop to approach this experiment, including felt, paper, needles, embroidery floss, scissors, a typewriter, and notably stacks of excerpted phrases and passages from Woolf’s writing.
Woolf’s words inspire
I attended the workshop with an interest in expanding the scope and thinking of my own creative practice. I had recently begun to work with pottery and ceramics to process through art Woolf’s discussions of the East, and within the exercises of this project I have come to recognize the benefits of exploring theories in creative practice via additional modes of craft.
Participants of Melissa Johnson’s “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop busy at work. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.
Taking Johnson’s cue to create from our specific approaches to Woolf, I decided to work with a phrase that caught my eye among the stacks of prompt cards: “white plates in a sunny room.”
The phrase is found from a monologue by Susan in the third section of The Waves. “Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and butter and white plates in a sunny room.”
In contemplation with my conference paper about Woolf’s discourse on the chinoiserie plate, I took the liberty to suspect, in the context of the British empire’s taste for the willow pattern aesthetic, that the plates in question could be of such design.
After all, Susan’s monologue follows another visualization from Bernard about patterned plates with “Oriental long-tailed birds.” In the empire on which the sun “never” sets, crusts and bread and butter and chinoiserie plates are aligned for consumption in its sunny rooms – though the novel repeatedly gestures to a smashing of china from afar.
Serena’s finished piece from the “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop. Photo by Serena Wong.
Text and thread combine
I completed my workshop piece by typing the phrase on paper and adding to it an embroidered design with needle and thread.
There is something especially beautiful about stitching on paper. In working with so delicate a medium, the practice registers an attempt to make solid what is elusive, as with capturing words on a typewriter or framing sensations in art.
My piece thus results from a merging of my interpretations in reading, pottery painting, and stitching. A huge thank you to Johnson for hosting the wonderful craft workshop, which produced a token for me that I now have framed on my desk as a remembrance of the 2024 Woolf conference.
By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island
Leanne Oden (center) with Callie Weiler of Fresno State University (right) discuss Weiler’s group project, which created an interactive virtual room in the form of a garden that interprets the works and lives of the Bloomsbury artists. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.
I attended Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended” where I had a lovely conversation with Callie Weiler about the project that she, Joseph LeForge, and Elizabeth Cardenas created as part of a graduate course with J. Ashley Foster.
Titled “The Cultivation of Love and Identity,” it created a virtual room in the form of a garden that interprets the works and lives of the Bloomsbury artists.
Reimagining Bloomsbury as a virtual garden space
Callie shared the vision for this project as outlined in the group’s abstract: “Bloomsbury’s life and love are difficult to describe in concrete terms, and it is this difficulty that necessitates a ludic reimagining of the space they created for themselves and others.
“They transcend barriers and labels to congregate as a group of individuals decisively to explore their meaning of love in its ephemeral, ungraspable form: love is a stimulating exchange, expressed with and through art, and was undefined by sexual orientation, the number, or the gender of partners engaged in romantic discourse.”
Callie walked me through the creative process step by step, starting from the readings that were assigned, choosing partners to collaborate with, identifying a topic, mocking up a storyboard, building a website, and designing the virtual room using Unreal Engine, culminating in a final paper composed by the group.
Creating the garden
The garden they created is fully interactive, allowing users to choose a path in the garden leading to a different artist. Each artist’s path is marked by an associated color.
She shared with me that the idea is to represent each color of the rainbow to emphasize the fluidity of sexuality and gender expression embraced by this group of modernist artists. Users were welcome to add to the garden, making this a truly communal, multimodal project.
Leanne Oden is a first-year Ph.D. student and an Instructor of Record in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. In her forthcoming research, Leanne is interested in questioning the closure narrative of the illness versus health binary as challenged through Woolf’s writing among other modernists. In her role as an educator for the University of Rhode Island, she regularly teaches ENG 110: Introduction to Literature and WRT 106: Introduction to Research Writing.
Serena Wong
Serena Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral study situates itself at the crossroads of British modernisms and Chinese modernity, with a focus on the orientalism in Virginia Woolf’s stylistic and formal representations of China. Her research also looks at theoretical and creative studies of ornamentation, which she positions as an important dimension of orientalist thought.
Hatchard’s will celebrate the publication of Maggie Humm’s new book, The Bloomsbury Photographs (2024) with a special “lantern show” at 18:30 BST on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at its shop on Piccadilly.
About the event
At the event, Maggie Humm will offer a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group by showing a curated selection of the thousands of photographs that shows them in a setting of domestic intimacy. Scenes include the pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays of the group.
According to Hatchard’s: “Several photographs are blurred as if taken in a hurried moment of time, and unguarded close-ups reflect complex personal relationships – revealing them to be more than simply documents; they are testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.”
Humm is vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of many monographs about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, including her novel Talland House, which is based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
There was nothing one could not say, nothing one could not do, at 46 Gordon Square – “Old Bloomsbury,” Virginia Woolf, 1921).
Founded this year in Antwerp, the Gordon Square Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and propagating the free thinking of the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf through lectures, exhibitions, concerts, performances, debates and more.
Founders include Isabel Miquel Arques, Yasmine Geukens, Marie-Paule De Vil, Ben Majchrowicz, and Eric Rinckhout.
Take a look at the group’s upcoming events, as well as membership opportunities. And for more information, visit https://www.gordonsquaresociety.net/.
Gordon Square Society Events
Sept. 28: A pre-festival ‘Fundraising Evening’ at a unique location in Antwerp with treats for body and mind, Bloomsbury cocktails and food, and music performances. Meet society members in person during its exclusive introductory evening in the beautiful setting of Casa Lozana. The society will provide treats for body and mind, with Bloomsbury cocktails and food, and a performance by internationally renowned mezzo-soprano Natascha Petrinsky. Petrinsky has performed opera roles at Europe’s greatest opera houses, such as La Monnaie in Brussels, La Fenice in Venice, La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London. Participation is €100. RSVP by email to info@gordonsquaresociety.net before 15 September.
Nov. 22, 23 and 24: The group’s first ‘Virginia Woolf & Bloomsbury Festival’ will take place, in several beautiful locations in Antwerp, with inspiring speakers, artistic performances and engaging debates.
46 Gordon Square, London, the early Victorian home that Virginia (Stephen) Woolf shared with her siblings, Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian from 1905-1907.
Dec. 7: Post-festival, everyone is invited for a ‘High Tea Candlelight Reading with Virginia Woolf’, 7 December, with tea and cakes and readings from Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’.
Become a Member
Membership helps the group plan and hold events, where leading international speakers and performers are invited to speak and perform. There are three membership categories: Member, Young Member or Gordon Patron. Membership options begin at €20 per year, and each offers unique features.
You can find membership information at: www.gordonsquaresociety.net. Or send an email with the membership option of your choice to: info@gordonsquaresociety.net.
Virginia Woolf died 83 years ago today, on March 28, 1941. Lots has been written about her life — and her death. But today I want to suggest that we remember her by reading her work.
The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is doing just that by organizing a new Woolf and Bloomsbury reading group for members only, which gives us one more reason to join that esteemed society.
The group will read the works of Virginia Woolf and some of her Bloomsbury contemporaries and friends to find connections, influences and similarities between them.
The meetings will be a mixture of face-to-face and online discussions, with the kick-off meeting to take place online on April 6.
The May meeting will be the first reading group, which will focus on a discussion of The Voyage Out.
You can be a part of it by joining the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, starting at £25 (£10 students).
Read Woolf on your own
You can also vow to read Woolf on your own. Take a look at two ways to do this in this recent post on Blogging Woolf.
