Veiling

 

I’m working on veiling for my next body of work. Having made a veil as a response to a call for work at Jane Austen House last year, I found representing her equivocal view of marriage in that way worked well. I’ve decided to start in that format by designing veils for fictional characters – Miss Havisham and the Woman in white are obvious candidates from my PhD research. However I may then go on to look at the writing and memoirs of real people. I recently attended the ‘Silence in the archive’ conference in Oxford, looking at how women’s voices have been silenced in the historical record, either voluntarily by themselves or by family, biographers and historians. It left me thinking there was a fund of information in women’s life writing that could be inspirational for practice. I think this could be a huge project!