Archives: Digital Events

Circus Troupes and Parachutes: The Many Lives of Laura Knight with Alice Strickland

The Modern Women Artists series

The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art, connecting stories of female creativity which the history books have all too often left out.

Circus Troupes and Parachutes: The Many Lives of Laura Knight with Alice Strickland

Laura Knight (1877–1970) was an English Realist painter who documented life and culture in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.

Educated at a time when studying life-drawing was the preserve of male artists, Knight railed against social restrictions of the day and established her own life studio. She was a consummate documentarist and her studies of the ballet as well as her government-commissioned depictions of women’s wartime labour during the First World War are some of the this artist’s most enduring works.

The first female artist to be elected a full Royal Academician, and with a career that spanned seven decades, Knight was one of the most important artists of her day. Today her work features in public collections across the UK and around the world, including Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museums, London.

Author:

Alice Strickland is a curator for the National Trust in Londonand the South East. Her doctorate considered British women war artists of the Second World War and she has been awarded a Paul Mellon research grant for a publication on women war artists of the First World War. Her other publications include ‘Learning from the Masters’ (2013) and Ethel Gabain, Evelyn Gibbs and Evelyn Dunbar: Three Approaches to Professional Art Practice in Interwar Britain (2008).

Hosted by:

Harriet Olsen is the founder of Eiderdown Books. She established the independent publishing house specialising in books about women artists after more than a decade in museum publishing (and having lost count of the number of books she’d produced about male artists). Harriet is also Head of Publishing at Pallant House Gallery in Sussex.

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“Man, woman or vegetable growth?” Lucy Howarth on Rediscovering Marlow Moss

The Modern Women Artists series

The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art, connecting stories of female creativity which the history books have all too often left out.

“Man, woman or vegetable growth?” Lucy Howarth on Rediscovering Marlow Moss

Marlow Moss (1889–1958) was a British Constructivist artist and a central figure in the development of European non-figurative art.

Moss’s importance to the history of modern art is arguably equal to that of her contemporary and friend Piet Mondrian, and yet her name has been relegated to obscurity. A pupil of Ferdinand Léger in Paris and one of the few women within the circle of influential artists in Paris in the late 1920s, Moss’s grid-like paintings, geometric sculptures and abstract reliefs sought to create a universal language of colour and form.

Today Moss’s work is beginning to be re-examined as a new generation of artists and art historians consider her contribution to modern art. Examples of this important artist’s work can be found in museums across Europe including at the Hague, and Tate, London.

Author:

Lucy Howarth completed her PhD thesis on Marlow Moss in 2008 and, after a period in the Tate Research Department, co-curated the Moss display, which toured from Tate St Ives, to Leeds Art Gallery, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings (now Hastings Contemporary) and Tate Britain (2013-15). Lucy was consultant curator for the 2017 Moss exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. She has taught in Fine Art and Art History departments at UK universities, run a contemporary art project space in Margate, and worked for various artists directly. Lucy currently teaches at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, and continues to research Marlow Moss amongst other things.

Hosted by:

Harriet Olsen is the founder of Eiderdown Books. She established the independent publishing house specialising in books about women artists after more than a decade in museum publishing (and having lost count of the number of books she’d produced about male artists). Harriet is also Head of Publishing at Pallant House Gallery in Sussex.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Nina Hamnett: Life or Art? The Challenge of Writing about Women Artists by Alicia Foster

The Modern Women Artists series

The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art, connecting stories of female creativity which the history books have all too often left out.

Nina Hamnett: Life or Art? The Challenge of Writing about Women Artists by Alicia Foster

Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was an artist, illustrator and writer who was associated with the bohemian and avant-garde circles of the London and Parisian art scenes in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Hamnett’s career included designs for the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops; she was also an artist’s model for her friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and published her life-story in two autobiographies. But it was her sensitive and formal still life paintings, her striking, often acerbic drawings, and her perceptive portraits of poets, dancers and friends which defined her achievements as an artist.

Alicia Foster brings together works from public and private collections to foreground the accomplishments of a talented and ambitious woman who wasn’t afraid to do things differently. In this book, for the first time, Nina Hamnett is celebrated as an artist in her own right.

Author:

Dr Alicia Foster is an art historian, curator and novelist. She curated the first ever museum show of Jessica Dismorr’s work in the exhibition ‘Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contempories’ (2019) at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and wrote the accompanying book. Previous publications include ‘Gwen John’ (Tate, 2015) and the first complete survey of women artists in in Tate collections ‘Tate Women Artists’ (2004). Her first novel ‘Warpaint’ (2013) tells the story of four women artists who were employed by the British government in 1942-3, making offical war art and black propaganda. She is a regular contributor to ArtUK and is currently working on her second novel.

Hosted by:

Harriet Olsen is the founder of Eiderdown Books. She established the independent publishing house specialising in books about women artists after more than a decade in museum publishing (and having lost count of the number of books she’d produced about male artists). Harriet is also Head of Publishing at Pallant House Gallery in Sussex.

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From Buttons to Bowls: Isabella Smith on Ceramicist Lucie Rie

The Modern Women Artists series

The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art, connecting stories of female creativity which the history books have all too often left out.

From Buttons to Bowls: Isabella Smith on Ceramicist Lucie Rie

In this exciting new introduction by Isabella Smith, Lucie Rie’s tumultuous life is explored through her extraordinary work.

From early promise as a ceramic artist in Europe, Rie found herself on the verge of obscurity in Britain and spent her wartime ‘cabbage-days’ creating buttons to make ends meet.

But by the 1950s, her intentionally flawed and experimental glazed designs had become popular British domestic wares. Her signature sgraffito technique and later ‘flared-lip’ vases are now among her most recognisable work.

Today, as Rie’s pots smash international auction records, interest in this émigré artist – who fled Nazi-occupied Europe to become an icon of ceramic art – continues to grow.

Author:

Isabella Smith has been immersed in ceramic art since 2014, when she began working as a research assistant for a private collector of British art pottery. After an art history MA at the Courtauld Institute, which focused on the use of clay in performance art, she worked as an assistant editor at Ceramic Review magazine, and is now deputy editor at the Crafts Council’s magazine, Crafts. She also writes for publications such as Apollo, ArtReview, Frieze, the Guardian and The TLS. Lucie Rie published by Eiderdown Books isher first book.

Hosted by:

Harriet Olsen is the founder of Eiderdown Books. She established the independent publishing house specialising in books about women artists after more than a decade in museum publishing (and having lost count of the number of books she’d produced about male artists). Harriet is also Head of Publishing at Pallant House Gallery in Sussex.

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“I’d rather take a picture than be one”: Lee Miller by Ami Bouhassane

The Modern Women Artists series

The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art, connecting stories of female creativity which the history books have all too often left out.

“I’d rather take a picture than be one”: Lee Miller by Ami Bouhassane

Lee Miller (1907-1977) was a fashion model, a photo-journalist and an artist who captured extraordinary moments of modern life.

As model and muse, Miller is too often only considered through the lens of the men she knew and loved. Yet she was an artist who forged her own path and who built a career which overturned expected social stereotypes. Her photography explored in her own unique way the objectification of the female form, and later documented the experience of women during the Second World War.

A contemporary of the British Surrealists, Miller’s contribution to the group is explored in this introduction to her work, as is her involvement in the development of the photographic technique of solorisation, previously solely attributed to Man Ray. Capturing some of the most enduring images of the early twentieth century, Miller’s work offers a record for our times.

Eiderdown Books is an independent publisher making books about female artists written by leading female writers, art historians and cultural commentators.

Author:

Ami Bouhassane is co-director of Farley’s House & Gallery Ltd, the organisation that manages the Lee Miller Archives, the Penrose Collection and Farleys House, home of her grandparents Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. She is a trustee of the Lee Miller Archives and has curated exhibitions and lectured widely on both Miller and Penrose, having worked extensively with their material for over 20 years. Recent publications include her biographical recipe book’Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes’ (2017), and the essay ‘Lee Miller and the Mermaid’, written for the exhibition catalogue Photographer Lee Miller: The Liberation of Denmark, May 1945, which was presented at The Museum of National History at Frederiksberg in 2018

Hosted by:

Harriet Olsen is the founder of Eiderdown Books. She established the independent publishing house specialising in books about women artists after more than a decade in museum publishing (and having lost count of the number of books she’d produced about male artists). Harriet is also Head of Publishing at Pallant House Gallery in Sussex.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Ancient Pagan Werewolf Cults and Their influence on the ‘witch cults’ of Medieval Europe – Denny Sargent

Ancient Pagan Werewolf Cults and Their influence on the ‘witch cults’ of Medieval Europe

From the 40,000 year old image of a hunting werewolf cave painting to the modern revival of Pagan werewolf magick, shapeshifting and specifically werewolfery, has been an important though often overlooked part of Western Pagan thought and practice. This presentation begins with documented prehistoric werewolf cults and Pagan werewolf shape shifting practices and then follows classical historians such as Herodotus and Livy and their first hand observations of werewolf ritual shapeshifting practices within the primal religious traditions and practices of ancient Greece, Rome, Scythia, among others.

The influence of these deep-seated animistic ‘shamanic’ practices clearly influenced the Pagan survivals in Europe post- Rome and a surprising percentage of ‘witches’ that were persecuted and executed by the Church were accused of being witches and werewolves. The atrocious witchcraft trial documents give clear indications that shapeshifting ‘werewolf’ practices were part of these small Pagan cults as well as later werewolf cult survivals like the Benandanti cult, sometimes called the ‘Wolves of God,’ as well as werewolf warrior cults in Ireland, Scotland and other Celtic countries where even today werewolves (like the Wulvers) are still looked upon favorably.

Note: Full lecture notes, a bibliography and online resources will be provided on my blog at dennysargentauthor.com at the time of the presentation.

Speaker Bio:

Denny Sargent – A Seattle writer, artist and university instructor whose extensive global travels and esoteric studies informed the backbone to numerous published books. Involved for decades with numerous esoteric traditions, the author has published works on Alternative Religions, Hermetic Magick, Taoism, Animism, Shinto and Tantra. Published books include: Global Ritualism, The Tao of Birth Days, Your Guardian Angel And You, Clean Sweep, The Book of the Horned One, Naga Magick, Dancing With Spirits, Werewolf Magick. He regularly presents lively online workshops and lectures and previously hosted at conventions and gatherings. He teaches university classes on Linguistics, Methodology and Pedagogy in TESOL, is an artist and has a dog named Faunus. He is very eclectic.

Curated and Hosted by Dr Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

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Forgotten Alchemists, Ritual Magicians, and Balloonists of London: Introducing Margaret and George Graham – Dan Harms

Forgotten Alchemists, Ritual Magicians, and Balloonists of London: Introducing Margaret and George Graham

The husband and wife duo of Margaret and George Graham were two of London’s most famous balloonists. Their exploits in the heights captured Britain’s imagination, but their occult fascinations remained unknown until recently. Astrology and alchemy! Balloon crashes! The secrets of the Mercurii! More balloon crashes! A mysteriously altered Key of Solomon! Did we mention balloon crashes? Author and librarian Dan Harms speaks on these fascinating figures of late Georgian-era London.

Speaker Bio:

Dan Harms is a librarian and author from upstate New York, and editor of the Llewellyn annotated edition of The Long-Lost Friend. He has also edited The Book of Oberon, Angels, Demons, and Spirits, and the Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia. His research interests include early modern grimoires, nineteenth-century ritual magic, and roleplaying games.

Curated and Hosted by Dr Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Practical Energy Magic 2 – David Lee – by Zoom

This mini-course consists of two two-hour sessions.

Part One – Wednesday 26th April 7pm-9pm

Part Two – Wednesday 3rd May 7pm-9pm

Ticket is both parts

Part 2 of Practical Energy Magic consists of explorations of internal sensed energy practices and the energy-alchemy of desire. In the first of these two 2-hour sessions we’ll explore the practice and theory of internal energy circulation and concepts of auric structures and power-centres. In the second we’ll discuss and practice a rehearsal of sexual energy transmutation using the Dragon-Eagle Working.

Health Warning: If you have a severe heart condition, such as would make it dangerous for you to run for a bus, do not attempt the exercises in this course without medical advice.

If you have any other condition which concerns you, take medical advice before doing these exercises.

BIO:

Dave Lee’s magickal practice began in the late 1970s with the multi-model approach known as chaos magick. He has spent over four decades exploring consciousness and changing realities, using techniques that include meditation, magick, psychedelics and energy work. He was a founder member in 1980 of the first ever working group of the Illuminates of Thanateros chaos magickal order, and still serves in that community as an Elder. He joined the Rune-Gild in 1996 and was recognized as a Master of Rune-Lore in 2007. His books include the ground-breaking Life-Force: Sensed Energy in Breathwork, Psychedelia and Chaos Magic. 

He publishes a newsletter very month or two with details of his forthcoming events and publications. All his public-facing links including the newsletter signup are here: https://linktr.ee/david23lee

Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England – a Zoom talk by Sean O’Connor

Borley Rectory, an ordinary-looking (some would say ugly) red-brick Victorian house, perched on a ridge near the north Essex–Suffolk border, is to this day spoken of in hushed tones – even though it was demolished more than three-quarters of a century ago. Completed in 1863, the signs were unpromising from the start, with the death of a 17-year-old labourer – who drowned in the local river during the house’s construction – setting the tone for what was to come, and causing mutterings among the superstitious locals about bad omens. 

Classic English haunting tropes soon became associated with the house: a ghostly horse-drawn coach driven by two headless men was seen; the grounds were allegedly the site of an ancient plague pit; and a spectral nun was said to promenade through the garden… 

In 1928, Eric and Mabel Smith arrived from India to take over the lonely parish of Borley, 60 miles northeast of central London. Soon after moving into Borley Rectory, Mrs Smith made a gruesome discovery in a cupboard: a human skull. Before long, the house was electric with ghosts. And within a year, the Smiths had abandoned it and the Rectory became notorious as the ‘most haunted house in England’.

When the next incumbent of the Rectory, the Reverend Lionel Foyster, moved into the house, he experienced a further explosion of poltergeist activity – with an increasing violence seemingly directed at his attractive young wife. Marianne Foyster was a passionate woman isolated in a village haunted by ancient superstition and deep-rooted prejudice. She was to become the key figure at the heart of the haunting, alongside the Rolls Royce-driving ‘psychic detective’ Harry Price. 

Borley was the case that was to make Price’s name as the most-celebrated ghost-hunter of the age. And the case that, later, would cast that hard-earned reputation into serious doubt…

Sean O’Connor is a writer, director and producer who has worked in theatre, radio, television and film. He has worked as showrunner on several major TV series including EastEnders, Hollyoaks and Minder. He produced Terence Davies’ film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston. Handsome Brute, a study of the 1940s murderer Neville Heath, and The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award (2020), were both published by Simon & Schuster, as is The Haunting of Borley Rectory, his most-recent book. 

 

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

The Creative Life of Tirzah Garwood Ravilious by Lotte Crawford

The Modern Women Artists series

The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art, connecting stories of female creativity which the history books have all too often left out.

The Creative Life of Tirzah Garwood Ravilious by Lotte Crawford

Tirzah Garwood (1908 – 51) excelled in marbling, wood-engraving, collage and a style of painting which fused English romanticism with her domestic life.

Marriage – to the artist Eric Ravilious – and motherhood curtailed her artistic ambitions but not her imagination: she found creative expression and commercial success with intricately patterned papers created on teh kitchen table and in the bathtub.

In Garwood’s early wood-engraving and later paintings dolls houses, train journeys and shop fronts are infused with her acerbic wit. Overshadowed by her husband’s success, this book celebrates the story of Tirzah Garwood as an artist in her own right.

Eiderdown Books is an independent publisher making books about female artists written by leading female writers, art historians and cultural commentators.

About the author

Lotte Crawford is an art historian and Senior Lecturer of Art Theory for the Visual Communication BA at Arts University Bournemouth. Her research examines contributions by women artists within the histories of modernism, pattern and textiles. Her monograph Enid Marx’s Material Modern: The Enchantment of Pattern is forthcoming. Lotte was the assistant curator of ‘Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles’ at Two Temple Place (2019-20) and is a recent Postdoctoral Fellow for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2021-22).

Hosted by:

Harriet Olsen is the founder of Eiderdown Books. She established the independent publishing house specialising in books about women artists after more than a decade in museum publishing (and having lost count of the number of books she’d produced about male artists). Harriet is also Head of Publishing at Pallant House Gallery in Sussex.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day