© 2024 SURF
My primary artistic research project tested how looking back to an understudied artwork of the past
could release new historical findings that contribute to both art history and contemporary feminist
thought, and also inspire new artworks that re-imagine these findings for today.
• The historic artwork is The Ten Largest (1907), a painting series by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. My
research explored previously unrelated archives and led to new insights on the sources the artist
used to generate these famous images. The results were published by Tate Modern, in the
catalogue titled ‘Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life,’ Tate Publications, 2023.
• I also explored my findings in a series of paintings I made, titled ‘Our Spectral Gardens,’ 2022-23.
These were inspired by the underlying concepts I found to have inspired af Klint’s work. They were
exhibited at Galerie Maurits van de Laar in The Hague in autumn 2023, at the same time as ‘The
Ten Largest’ were exhibited in The Kunstmuseum, The Hague.
• A peer reviewed academic article connecting the historic and creative work will be published by Aalto
University and The Research in Arts and Education Journal in 2024. I will give a conference paper
at Aalto University in November 2023 and a public talk at The Kunstmuseum, The Hague in
January, 2024.
• Successful completion of this artistic research post-doc has enriched the development of MA Artistic
Research, the programme I lead at the KABK. It has led to the redevelopment of one key
component of the curriculum, ‘Research Weeks’, and the successful introduction of another
element, ‘We Are a Research Community.’ I shared my research with both students and the
teaching team and worked with a rich variety of guests, sharing the ideas and process held within
my core research in different ways.
Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side?
This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history.
Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.