Neidio i’r brif dudalen lywio Neidio i chwilio Neidio i’r prif gynnwys

Between Love and Work: Bisexual Perspectives in the Art of Roberta M. Graham and Helen Chadwick

Gweithgaredd: Sgwrs neu gyflwyniadSgwrs wadd

Disgrifiad

This talk traced Helen Chadwick and Roberta M. Graham’s creative and loving friendship through close readings of Graham’s Fallen Angel (1986) and Chadwick’s Lofos Nymphon (1987), exploring how these photographic installations illustrate what Clare Hemmings describes as a “bisexual perspective”. In the discourse around both artists work their male collaborators are well documented, while their influence on each other has so far gone unexamined. When and why does bisexuality disappear, and with what effects?

Rather than keep Chadwick and Graham’s relationship outside of their art, I read their intimate bodily knowledge as an integral engine for their work: a method, if you will. Deploying an embodied approach that draws on telephone conversations with Graham and research on Chadwick’s archive, I narrated my longing for a bisexual genealogy, exposing the erotic and ethical terrain that often characterises such queer art historical research. This talk raised questions about the role and limits of reading biography into the analysis of artworks, the extent to which researchers should narrate their attachments to the material they study, and what kind of knowledge is produced when they do so?
Cyfnod12 Chwef 2026
Teitl y digwyddiadHistory of Art Postgraduate Research Seminar: Critical Biographies: Personal History as Method and Matter
Math o ddigwyddiadSeminar
LleoliadCambridge, Teyrnas Unedig Prydain Fawr a Gogledd IwerddonDangos ar fap