Pressing Matters
Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf
An exhibition in the Library Exchange, University of Sussex Library
20 June – 29 September 2025
Image courtesy of Ane Thon Knutsen
This exhibition brings together contemporary art that engages with the work of Virginia Woolf as both a modernist writer and publisher. The exhibition, which will run in the University of Sussex Library from June—September 2025, coincides with the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway and with the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which will take place at the University of Sussex (co-hosted with King’s College London), 5th-8th July 2025.
The largest work in the exhibition, Ane Thon Knutsen’s Mapping Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, is a collective response to a long modernist poem by Nancy Cunard, which alongside Woolf’s more famous novel was also published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press 100 years ago in 1925. This collaborative and continually evolving artwork is part of a three-year artistic research project on past, present and future publishing, expanding work begun with students at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. It has been added to by staff and students at the University of Sussex, using its Victorian Albion Press and will be further developed with participants at the Virginia Woolf conference and beyond. Ane Thon Knutsen is the 2025 Artist in the Archives for the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex.
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.
Artist credit: Eleanor Crook, ‘Wax Virginia’ (2015). Photography credit: Stuart Robinson (University of Sussex)
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 owned by the University of Sussex Library. The collection includes translations from the 1920s to the 1970s in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Macedonian.
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.