A colourful record of a complex and provocative Australian artist.
Bee-stung Lips: Barbara Hanrahan – Works on Paper 1960–1991, a major survey exhibition held at Flinders University Art Museum in 2021, showed the diversity of artist Barbara Hanrahan’s practice via the presentation of more than 180 works, including lithographs, linocuts, screen prints and etchings. The accompanying catalogue (published by Wakefield Press) reproduces more than 100 of these. The images are complemented by three essays that examine the artist’s inspirations and themes.
Throughout her life, Barbara Hanrahan (1939–1991) lived in Adelaide (her birthplace), London and Melbourne. Despite a life cut short by death at age 52 from cancer, she produced over 400 works on paper and published 15 books. In recognition of her strong connections to the Thebarton area (she was raised and educated in the suburb), local residents recently campaigned to have a park named in her honour.
Nic Brown’s essay, Time Travel, Bees and Celestial Bodies in the Art of Barbara Hanrahan, explores how the artist’s work connects with mid-20th century sexual politics and expectations of women—how they should look and behave. Brown highlights Hanrahan’s suggestions of the passage of time, death and rebirth, and the interdependence of people and the natural world.
Barbara Hanrahan: Relationality, Vulnerability, Life by Jacqueline Millner, delves deeply into the artist’s “visceral connection to family, place and interspecies ecologies”. Hanrahan’s works, Millner argues, question our notions of what is “proper” and reject the policing of identity and body boundaries.
Elspeth Pitt, in the book’s third essay, Print, Poetry and the Romantic Imagination: Barbara Hanrahan and William Blake, introduces and explores the influence of William Blake (1757–1827; English poet, painter and printmaker) on Hanrahan’s life and work. This chapter touches on the artist’s time at the South Australian School of Art, her collaboration with her partner, Jo Steele, and the comfort found in Blake’s work while undergoing treatment for cancer. As Hanrahan contemplated death, depictions of “wild-eyed, childlike angels” appeared in her prints. Like Blake’s visions, Hanrahan’s angels embody free-moving consciousness floating in “nebulous, horizonless space”.
There are notes following each essay, along with a catalogue of works and a chronology outlining key points in Hanrahan’s personal life and career. The artworks are a riot of rich detail, often containing intricate patterning and references to popular culture, advertising and domesticity.
Bee-stung Lips, via its varied perspectives, encourages a new and closer examination of a collection of works alive with the intricate messiness of life. It is an engrossing glimpse into the passions and inspirations of a prolific and significant Australian artist.
Reviewed by Jo Vabolis
Twitter: @JoVabolis
Distributed by: Wakefield Press
Released: August 2021
RRP: $39.95
This review is the opinion of the reviewer and not Glam Adelaide.
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