The Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey will host a talk by Maggie Humm titled “The Bloomsbury Photographs” from noon-2 p.m. EST and from 5-7 p.m. BST on Wednesday, June 11.
As the final talk of the society’s Woolf season, Humm will discuss her latest book, The Bloomsbury Photographs (Yale UP, 2024). She will explore the relationships, friendships and stories of the Bloomsbury group, offering a unique visual and historical perspective.
About Humm
Maggie Humm
Humm is an Emeritus Professor University of East London and Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. She has written and edited numerous books about Woolf and Bloomsbury, including a novel, Talland House, based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
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.
In September, the venerable location of Bloomsbury in the country will open a new venue in the former district council offices in Southover Road in Lewes that will feature a shop, a pop-up café pop-up café operated by Lewes-based Caccia & Tails, and a free program of co-produced community projects, artist-led workshops, gallery activities, and a learning program.
Charleston, 2019
The effort is the first step in bringing 100 of the most important Bloomsbury works back to Sussex and providing a growing Bloomsbury archive in a central location that is accessible to researchers and visitors.
Two free exhibitions will be featured during the venue’s first season, which will run Sept. 13 through Jan. 7, 2024:
“Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion,” which will feature catwalk fashion by the likes of Dior, Fendi and Burberry alongside never-before-seen Bloomsbury portraits and personal items including Virginia Woolf’s handbag, embroidered by Vanessa Bell, and
Here is what Nathaniel Hepburn, director of Charleston, has to say about the project:
“Since Charleston reopened after the pandemic, we have been working in partnership with the council and community groups in Lewes to develop a bold and ambitious vision which could transform the cultural life of Lewes and replicate the ‘Rodin effect’ from 1999 when Tate lent the famous Kiss sculpture to the town.
“It is exciting to be able to announce plans to launch this space in time for a major cultural season happening across Sussex to coincide with the largest contemporary art prize in the world – Turner Prize – being hosted in Eastbourne. It’s a great moment to put Lewes on the map as an important part of the region’s cultural offer.”
According to the Charleston website:
It is not a new idea for the Bloomsbury group to explore creating a cultural centre in Lewes. During the Second World War, the economist John Maynard Keynes, alongside Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, worked on a project for the precursor of the Arts Council, making designs for a theatre and art gallery – with a café – for small towns across the country, using Lewes as a model.
The most recent volume of Woolf Studies Annual, No. 29 (2023), edited by Benjamin Hagen, president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, is now available.
To purchase the journal, follow this link and click “Add to Cart.” At checkout, enter the discount code WSA2023 for 20% off. You do not have to create an account in order to make a purchase.
This issue features the research of Celia R. Caputi, Danielle N. Gilman, Lingxiang Ke, John Pedro Schwartz, and Kathryn Van Wert.
In addition to several new book reviews, Part 2 of the WSA Index, and an updated guide to scholarly collections, the volume also includes a forum on Mark Hussey’s 2021 biography of Clive Bell.
Contributors to the forum include Elizabeth Berkowitz, Claire Davison, Diane Gillespie, Maggie Humm, Christopher Reed, and Mark Hussey (in response).
Woolf Studies Annual is a refereed journal publishing substantial new scholarship on the work of Woolf and her milieu. Each volume includes several articles, reviews of new books, and an up-to-date guide to library special collections of interest to researchers. The Annual also occasionally features edited transcriptions of previously unpublished manuscripts.
Shakespeare in Bloomsbury coming next month
Yale University Press will publish Marjorie Garber’s new book Shakespeare in Bloomsbury in September. It’s billed as “The untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group.”
Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Research Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies, emerita, at Harvard University.
She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, as well as of books on cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to bisexuality and cross-dressing. Her most recent book is Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession.
Shopping online for books devoted to Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury group, and the Hogarth Press? I have two sources for you. One, I have written about before. The other is new to me, although its proprietor is not.
York Harbor Books
Jon and Margaret Richardson are not newcomers to the world of Woolf. They have made hunting down the works of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group their mission since opening York Harbor Books in Maine more than 25 years ago.
The Richardson duo put out a list of “Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group” offerings each summer. This August’s list includes 27 pages of items, including the following:
First edition of Virginia’s The Common Reader (1925) with the Vanessa Bell cover,
Signed copy of the first American edition of Leonard’s Downhill All the Way, An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (1967),
Julie Singleton’s A History of Monks House and Village of Rodmell, Sussex Home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (2008) from Cecil Woolf Publishers,
First edition of Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926),
Very scarce first edition of David Garnett’s Never Be a Bookseller (1929).
Second Wind Books
Second Wind Books is the brainchild of Leslie Arthur, who is also not a newcomer to the world of Woolf. Leslie and I met at past Woolf conferences when she was in the midst of learning the craft of bookselling at the William Reese Co.
She now has an online shop of her own. Recently she has been “off buying new stock and furiously cataloguing it” and attending a rare books seminar in Minnesota and Rare Books School in California, according to emails to Blogging Woolf that announce her new site.
