Cartography for Girls, An A - Z of Orientations identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2016)
Cartography for Girls, An A - Z of Orientations identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch, attempts to identify and map without hierarchy all of the experiences of women's consciousness in all of Iris Murdoch’s 26 novels. Whilst there are many ways of thinking about what might constitute women's experience, in this instance, and responding to the author’s warnings about the dangers of classification, the strategy used to compile the A - Z was to apply Iris Murdoch’s philosophical thinking to her fictional depictions of gendered subjectivity, in novels originally published between 1954 and 1995.
Iris Murdoch’s observation ‘Loving is an orientation, a direction of energy, not just a state of mind’ has been key to my own art practice; in this case a consideration of the contemporary relevance of her fictional writing about women’s experience. Working from the premise that feminine subjectivity might be located within the consciousness of her women characters, I have adopted Murdoch’s term ‘orientation’ to represent these trajectories.
The book is published by INFORMATION AS MATERIAL. The launch for its publication took place at Reading as Art, Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre in October 2016.
Iris Murdoch’s observation ‘Loving is an orientation, a direction of energy, not just a state of mind’ has been key to my own art practice; in this case a consideration of the contemporary relevance of her fictional writing about women’s experience. Working from the premise that feminine subjectivity might be located within the consciousness of her women characters, I have adopted Murdoch’s term ‘orientation’ to represent these trajectories.
The book is published by INFORMATION AS MATERIAL. The launch for its publication took place at Reading as Art, Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre in October 2016.