Feminist Art Making Histories.

The title of this proposed research project is Feminist Art Making Histories (FAHM). The mission of FAHM is to record, curate and archive the oral histories and associated ephemera of feminist artists in Ireland and the UK from 1970 to the present day. Housed in perpetuity in the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), this archive will be an invaluable resource for artists, art students, art and cultural historians, art teachers in schools and HE, educationalists, DH scholars, digital resource developers, academic and museum leadership, curators, museologists, historians of UK/Ireland, cultural policy makers, EDI workers and policy makers. This is an innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative project involving Higher Education Institutions, researchers, an Advisory Board and stakeholders between the UK and Ireland. It will build and consolidate new, inclusive research partnerships to generate relevant, current lines of enquiry, stimulate new debate, promote the sharing of best practice and knowledge and stimulate transformational impact in DH.
FAHM sits within the thematic strand of 'digital humanities and cultural heritage'. The data to be collected in FAHM has been neither rigorously created, curated nor interpreted to date. This is a stark omission of care regarding the legacy of UK and Irish feminist art practice, which is already structurally marginalized within museology, art history and art pedagogies, and also within the broader spheres of knowledge production and curation associated with those aspects of shared cultural heritage between the two islands. It is strikingly evident that the history and legacy of UK/Irish feminist art practice has been subject to persistent erasure: lost, hidden, silenced and marginalised. Identifying this occluded, shared cultural heritage, and creating the unique proposed archive, addresses these disciplinary and cross-disciplinary elisions that persist to this day. FAMH will create an archive for all, allowing us to understand how these shared, past histories and legacies shape our thinking, identity and environment in the present, and stimulating reflection upon our shared future.
The collection and preservation of this archive is urgent for the purposes of current and future knowledge generation, but it is also time-critical insofar as a distressing number of feminist artists, art writers, teachers and curators have already died. These critical practitioners, their unique and rare perspective on and testimony to feminist art practice, are, for the most part, lost to us in the present day.
This project seeks to remedy this specific gap in knowledge and stimulate future research and understanding in this area. DH is fundamental to this objective as we place accessibility and searchability at the heart of our research mission. A multi-directional dynamic between digital records, digital tools, research technologies and feminist methodologies will develop a model for emancipatory research practice that can be used and adapted for other, future, DH projects. Gatekeeping can be a real obstruction to knowledge-generation. Each of us committed to this project bring a wealth of experience and established networks to this project that makes the research realisable. We are established and internationally recognised scholars and academic leaders who cross disciplinary boundaries in our academic expertise and all our practices, ranging from art history, art practice, art theory, classics, philosophy, cultural studies, cultural history, gender and women's studies, museology, curation, education studies, digital humanities, and visual culture.
We are asking the AHRC and IRC to enable us to generate an invaluable DH archive which will be available to the broad spectrum of practitioners and users of this project which spans DH and cultural heritages.
We thank you for considering our request for funding.