Barbara Hanrahan (1939 -1991) from Adelaide is regarded as one of Australia’s idiosyncratic artists who lived and worked in Adelaide, London and Melbourne. Her father passed away when she was one and she was raised, an only child, by her mother, a commercial artist.
.Hanrahan studied at the South Australian School of Art from 1957-1962. She began printmaking in 1960 and until 1963 worked part-time with Udo Sellbach and Karen Schepers. From 1963- 1964 she continued her studies at the Central School of Art in London, gaining a Diploma in Etching with distinction. She continued studying and working there for another year earning post-diploma skills in lithography, silk screening ,etching and wood engraving. From 1961-1962 Hanrahan taught at Western Teachers’ College and the South Australian School of Art during 1964-1965, then at Falmouth College of Art from 1967-1970.
An intimate relationship with Jo Steele, also South Australian born, who became a sculptor of note, began in 1966. The couple commuted between London and Adelaide for the next twenty years; they never officially married and had no children. In London Hanrahan turned seriously to writing. Between 1973 and 1992 Hanrahan produced fifteen books. Hanrahan’s work is bold and powerful , at times disturbing, often intricately detailed and patterned, and proudly feminist, celebrating the female form. The works are valiantly candid and manipulate fantasy and personal experience in humorously convoluted tales that are ornamented with a flourish.
BEE STUNG LIPS is the first major retrospective exhibition of Hanrahan’s extensive thirty year printmaking career and draws upon both public and private collections.
The exhibition scrutinizes some of the main themes displayed in her work: beauty. sex, the stage, family troubles and joys, becoming ‘other ‘ (animal or plant), spirituality and the possibility of the hereafter. Arcane and worldly ideas blend with concepts of mortality and time. Hanrahan links female sexuality and desire with incorporeality and imagination, and includes both gardens and starry skies to ponder the frailty of being human.
This is a wonderful book linked in with the current exhibition that has three major essays included at the front a huge portfolio of illustrations (more than a hundred of her works on paper), a separate catalogue of Hanrahan’s works, and a chronological timeline of her life.
In the foreword by Fiona Salmon the many and various mediums Hanrahan used are mentioned – woodcuts, linocuts, screen prints, lithographs, etchings and drypoints for example, as well as drawings,. paintings and collages.
Nic Brown examines the themes and influences in Hanrahan’s work and how the feminist issues (how women were viewed and presented, the social expectations of marriage etc) are explored and still extremely relevant to today .
Jacqueline Millner looks at how Hanrahan’s oeuvre explores traditional womanly vices and virtues and the vulnerability of interdependence ,as well as prominent motifs in her work and a cycle of desire and disgust, life and death, and the influence of Frida Kahlo on Hanrahan’s work. One of Hanrahan’s major motifs was the prominently displayed and decorated vulva, radiating female power.
Elspeth Pitt analyses the influence of William Blake’s poetry on Hanrahan’s work and also considers her work processes.
Linked in with the current exhibition at Flinders University in Adelaide the book marks the 30th anniversary of Hanrahan’s passing.
Authors : Nic Brown, Jacqueline Hillner, Elspeth Pitt
Publisher : Wakefield Press
ISBN: 9781743058619
Format : Paperback
The exhibition is on display at Flinders University until Friday 1 October 2021 .
https://www.flinders.edu.au/museum-of-art/exhibitions/bee-stung-lips-barbara-hanrahan
Lynne Lancaster