At this week's Liberal Arts research seminar we're pleased to welcome Professor Gill Perry, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the Open University. Gill will be speaking on ‘Islands, Goddesses, and Contemporary Art: Swimming with Circe and Mother Ireland’.

Join us at 3.30-4.45pm on Wednesday 5 February in 1.H029, School of Humanities. Drinks follow in the Staff Common Room, 13 Woodland Road - all are welcome!

"Drawing on research for her recent book Islands and Contemporary Art (Reaktion Books, September, 2024) Gill Perry argues that the goddess theme, and its troubled and contradictory histories, has often been closely associated with both geographical and metaphorical islands. She shows how women (especially female deities and their mythical reincarnations) have had long cultural and historical associations with the theme, often encouraging the essentialist fusion of ideas of ‘Mother Earth’ and islands. She suggests that such associations have increasingly been challenged and/or imaginatively reworked in recent visual and literary arts, notably in representations of part-goddesses such as Circe or Calypso, and the composite deity that is ‘Mother Ireland’. Perry argues that feminist scholars and visual artists are increasingly exploring the gender relations on and about islands, and their historical associations with female deities, producing some compelling reworkings of cultural history and its female archetypes. Watery and bodily metaphors abound. In the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy or the visual art of Irish artists Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, Jesse Jones or Dorothy Cross these ‘island queens’ are the subject of vivid and challenging new stories. She explores some of the ways in which contemporary artists have re-conceptualised a complex legacy of goddess imagery (as religious deities, as monstrous, as imperial or colonial metaphors) and island themes to create vivid and relevant symbols for a modern age."

Jesse Jones, Tremble Tremble, commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery for Ireland at Venice, Culture Ireland in partnership