Next week (until Thursday 25th September) is the final opportunity to see Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf. This exhibition in the Library Exchange brings together contemporary art that engages with the work of Virginia Woolf as both a modernist writer and publisher, including a striking life-sized waxwork of Virginia Woolf.
The largest work in the exhibition is Ane Thon Knutsen’s Mapping Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, a collective response to a modernist poem published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, hand-printed by students and staff at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the University of Sussex, and by participants at the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which was hosted at Sussex earlier this summer.
The exhibition also features To by A T Kabe Wilson — inspired by a pencil sketch of a lighthouse in the Charleston archive, the artwork is assembled from materials related to a film Kabe created when he was the 2023 Artist in the Archives for the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex.
Michelle Abbott’s 4 Beautiful Obscenities of Virginia Woolf forms part of an ongoing project of abstracted sewn insults, reinventing Woolf’s own insults through embroidery. In Yâdigar I (Keepsake I) and Yâdigar II (Keepsake II), Can Akgümüş creates a rich dialogue between Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography and two eighteenth-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. Similarly inspired by Woolf’s Orlando, Jane Hyslop’s artist’s book, The Oak Tree: a tribute to eternity, comprises a series of drawings and pochoir prints. Andrea Mindel’s Madame Defarge goes Bloomsbury is a series of dissident embroideries made in response to Woolf’s writing.
Alongside these contemporary responses to modernist experiment, the exhibition features ‘Wax Virginia’, a life-sized waxwork of the author made by artist Eleanor Crook. This striking sculpture was first devised by Ruth Richardson, Jane Wildgoose and Clare Brant at King’s College London, where the work has been housed since 2015 before making the journey down to Sussex on Dalloway Day in 2025.
The exhibition also includes a selection of translations of writings by Virginia Woolf from a collection housed by the University of Sussex Library.
Pressing Matters has been curated by the Centre for Modernist Studies (co-directed by Helen Tyson and Hope Wolf) in collaboration with the Library, and includes work generated for the Centre’s ‘Artist in the Archives’ initiative. It has been supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), at the University of Sussex, and by funding from the School of Media, Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition closes on Thursday 25th September.