Featured Researcher

My thesis provided a new perspective on British women’s working experiences in the First World War. It did so by offering alternative readings to popular perceptions using artistic works produced contemporaneously but also consumed at the time and subsequently. I curated a collection of seven artists and their artworks, ranging from large paintings to tiny snapshot photographs, that documented life in a range of working roles. 

Figure 1: Mairi Chisholm, “The Chisholm Papers,” National Library of Scotland, Acc

Curating a diverse range of visual media presented an opportunity to examine the emotional effects of the First World War. A conceptual framework based on the history of emotions became the lens through which I analysed the content, production, and commemorative use for each artistic work. For example, I found that individualscharacterised the emotional turbulence of working during conflict in the ways that they handled their material. Mairi Chisholm and her friend Elsie Knocker set up their own dressing station near to the front lines in Belgium in 1914. They treated soldiers who would not otherwise survive the journey to a hospital. Each page of Chisholm’s album is a consciously curated story about her life. For example, figure 1, a spread from the album shows a photograph of two friends smiling in a car. Above that snapshot is a haunting photograph of No Man’s Land. On the next page, three soldiers play at posing for the camera. My thesis identified and examined the juxtaposition of photographs under the lens of emotion to argue her actions were emblematic of her real-life experience, each single day contained a bizarre mix of conflicting experiences and feelings. Juxtaposing images in her album suggests Chisholm was aware of, and intentionally commenting on, the absurdity of war, and the incongruities of her life. 

Considering artistic works as socially meaningful objects meant that the case studies offered a new perspective on changing emotional contexts. Each chapter not only attended to the objects themselves but investigated how they have been deployed by curators and interpreted by viewers. In 2017, the Impressions Gallery in Bradford enhanced Chisholm’s snapshots and made them larger for display in an exhibition No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War. The prints were put to use under different circumstances as part of a wider initiative to encourage affective experiences in visitors. The curators deliberately placed these snapshots alongside professional photographs of women serving in contemporary conflicts for visitors to make connections between the generations.

Figure 2: Impressions Gallery, No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography of the First World War, 2017, Impressions Gallery.

Tracing visual media over time was a means of understanding how officially commissioned paintings, photographs, and private snapshots had been utilised by curators to tell stories about women’s wartime roles. By choosing artistic works that featured in centenary activities, the thesis drew connections between national, regional, and community commemorations.I argued that for the most part curators employed artistic works to reaffirm traditional narratives embedded in British attitudes and conceptions of the conflict, specifically through overused tropes and narratives regarding heroism, sacrifice, and emotional resilience. However, in adopting the lens of emotion and attending to the use of visual media in commemorative events I argued that curators such as those in the Impressions Gallery had purposefully curated emotion, meaning that there had been attempts to engage viewers differently by eliciting people’s emotional responses.