Will The Real Iris Murdoch Please Stand Up? (2019-
In September and October 2019 I had the pleasure of collaborating with Kingston University Archives and Special Collections, in an exploration of the construction of image and identity, through the twentieth century universe of Iris Murdoch and twenty first century Instagram; ‘Will The Real Iris Murdoch Please Stand Up?’. The project involved a series of workshops at the Archives in Kingston and is due to close with an exhibition of photographic selfie-posters. This exhibition was planned for Spring 2020, and is (as are many plans) currently postponed due to Covid 19. Alongside the sessions at the Archives, participants were invited to take part remotely via Instagram.
In 2016 I made a book, ‘Cartography for Girls, an A-Z of Orientations identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch’, in which I used Iris Murdoch's term 'orientation' to describe what form/s her literary construct of women's experiences might take. During the process of collating the book, I noticed that many of the orientations of Murdoch’s fictional women might apply equally to social media profile construction. To explore this curious connection (or maybe dislocation), I started an Instagram account, @cartography_for_girls.
Participants were invited to put together a selfie and an orientation from the A-Z, and to post them on Instagram, #therealirismurdoch. The A - Z is available for free download as a pdf here:
