‘[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives’: An Interview with Emma O’Toole

Abstract

The National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin recently mounted an exhibition entitled ‘[In]visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives’ (19 July 2018–3 March 2019). It showed material from two little-known but highly important repositories: the ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art, and the Yeats Archive, both of which relate to Irish women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From these archives, letters, scrapbooks, and photographs, as well as some works of art, including embroideries, were put on show, all made by women artists including Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, Mainie Jellett, Susan Yeats, and Evie Hone. The aim was to shed light on their education and artistic practice and to think further about the contribution they made both to major exhibitions and longer lasting artistic initiatives and movements. This interest in their lives and legacy is new; despite being some of the most progressive people in Ireland before and after independence — the suffragette movement and Revolutionary period were contemporaneous — they were overlooked by the Irish arts institutions of the day which were male dominated.

Keywords

• art education
• Yeats Archive
• Mainie Jellett
• Sarah Purser
• Irish women artists
• National Gallery Ireland