The quiet radicalism of still lifes
Philomena Epps, ArtUK
October 2022
In the introduction to This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life, and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century (2021), Rebecca Birrell asserts that her fixation with the still life genre was due to ‘its capacity to produce and accommodate intimacy, an affective power other genres simply could not provide’. For Birrell, the ‘oranges, lemons… lilies, cups of tea’ she observed in the work of Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Gwen John, among others – were much more than they appeared: ‘they were histories of women’s lives compiled by way of the objects that bore witness.’ […]