Book Launch: Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast

Artist, researcher and writer Daniel Jewesbury will read from his obsessive, excessive exploration of a single work of sculpture and the ‘meanings’ exploding from it. Daniel will describe the book’s development over more than 20 years.

For the Dublin launch, Jewesbury is joined by Tina Kinsella, Head of Department in Design and Visual Arts at IADT Dún Laoghaire, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Trinity College, and a Fellow of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media (GradCAM).

The conversation will be moderated will be Mick Wilson, Professor of Fine Art in HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design at the University of Gothenburg, and co-chair of CAPIm, the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, a collaboration between the University of Gothenburg and the Royal College of Art, Stockholm.

A slender young woman falls backwards, blown off her feet by a bomb. Frozen in time, her bare legs stick up, her hands grasping the air. Her face is covered by a page from a newspaper. People approach to look at her, bending down to study the folds of her dress, the immature curve of her thigh, her neat toes, splayed in surprise.

The woman is a sculpture, made by the Irish artist F. E. McWilliam in 1974. In this bronze figure’s awkwardly graceful near-death contortions, entire histories of pain, death, sex and visual pleasure have been condensed.

Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is an experimental artist’s book that uses different voices to unravel these histories: a writer labours over an elaborate ‘explanation’ of what she means, while the voice of the Woman herself offers acerbic insights and asides. In a series of short chapters, they assert their contrasting ideas, insisting on their own approaches to discovering her ‘true meaning’: by turns affective, confessional, detached and analytical.