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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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Exterior of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St.

Can’t get to New York City before March 5? No problem. You can view the digital version of the exhibit “Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind” from your easy chair by logging onto your computer.

Just go to the exhibit web page, scroll down, and click on each individual section of the exhibit in turn.

The sections are:

  1. Early Years
  2. Fiction
  3. Criticism
  4. The Hogarth Press
  5. Legacy

The online component also includes a slide show of 10 photographs that show what the in-person exhibit looks like.

Listen in as authors discuss the exhibit and Woolf

In addition, you can listen to 23 audio tracks, with transcripts, that guide you through the exhibit.

Each features a conversation between Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life (2020) and Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), as they discuss and dissect the exhibit’s individual components.

Shop Woolf

You can also shop the the Woolf collection available in the library’s online gift shop. It includes everything from notebooks to books to jewelry to tote bags.

Background on the Woolf exhibit

“Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind” is the library’s first major exhibition to focus on Woolf since 1993. This biographical exhibit of more than 100 items provides an intimate view of the author’s life and creative process, using her personal notebooks and diaries, family photographs, and unpublished letters.

It is drawn entirely from the library’s holdings, one of the most important collections of Woolf’s writings in the world.

Read more.

Interior shot of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St.

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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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The first exhibition featuring the life and achievements of Virginia Woolf through portraiture will be staged at the National Portrait Gallery in London, according to The Guardian.

NPG 5933. Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) by Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), 1912. Oil on board, 15 3⁄4 x 13 3⁄8 inches (400 x 340 mm). National Portrait Gallery, London

NPG 5933. Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) by Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), 1912. Oil on board, 15 3⁄4 x 13 3⁄8 inches (400 x 340 mm). National Portrait Gallery, London

The exhibit, curated by Frances Spalding, will feature more than 100 works, including paintings, photographs, drawings and rare archive material. The letter Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell before her suicide in 1941 will be included.

Titled “Virginia Woolf: Art, life and vision,” will be staged July 10 to Oct. 26. Read more.

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