Pressing Matters

Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf 

An exhibition in the Library Exchange, University of Sussex Library

20 June-25 September 2025

This exhibition brought together contemporary art that engages with the work of Virginia Woolf as both a modernist writer and publisher. The exhibition, which ran in the University of Sussex Library from June-September 2025, coincided with the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway and with the 34^th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which took place at the University of Sussex (co-hosted with King’s College London), 5 July-8 July 2025.

The largest work in the exhibition, Ane Thon Knutsen’s Mapping Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, was 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 formed 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. The artwork featured prints made by staff and students at the University of Sussex, and by participants at the Virginia Woolf conference, using the University’s Victorian Albion Printing Press. Ane Thon Knutsen was the 2025 Artist in the Archives for the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex.

The exhibition also featured 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 featured ‘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 included 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 was curated by the Centre for Modernist Studies (co-directed by Helen Tyson and Hope Wolf) in collaboration with the Library and included work generated for the Centre’s ‘Artist in the Archives’ initiative. It was 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.

Image credit: Stuart Robinson, University of Sussex