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Artist credit: Eleanor Crook, ‘Wax Virginia’ (2015). Photography credit: Stuart Robinson (University of Sussex)

Students, staff and visitors are warmly invited to explore Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf, a new exhibition on campus that brings together contemporary art engaging with the work of Virginia Woolf. Both a modernist writer and publisher, the exhibition reflects on Woolf’s enduring influence on literature, feminism and the creative arts, and runs in the University of Sussex Library Exchange from June–September 2025. 

Curated by the Centre for Modernist Studies (co-directed by English's Dr Helen Tyson and Dr Hope Wolf) in collaboration with the Library, Pressing Matters includes work generated for the Centre’s ‘Artist in the Archives’ initiative that invites creatives to work with the Centre. The largest work in the exhibition, Mapping Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, is a collective response to a long modernist poem by Cunard, created by the 2025 Artist in the Archives, Ane Thon Knutsen. This collaborative, evolving artwork is part of a three-year artistic research project on past, present and future publishing. Expanding work that began 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. The work will be further developed with participants at the forthcoming Virginia Woolf conference. 

Work by the 2023 Artist in the Archives, A T Kabe Wilson, is also featured. To is inspired by a pencil sketch of a lighthouse in the Charleston archive, assembled from materials related to a film Kabe created during the residency.

Wax Virginia, a life-sized waxwork of the author made by artist Eleanor Crook, has garnered much attention. 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. Last month, the work fittingly made its journey down to Sussex on Dalloway Day. Sussex is a natural home for Woolf’s likeness, as we also hold the Monk's House Papers, an extensive archive of Woolf’s letters, manuscripts, and press cuttings named after the Woolfs’ house in nearby Rodmell.

Pressing Matters includes a selection of translations of writings by Virginia Woolf from a collection owned by the University of Sussex Library, and Andrea Mindel’s Madame Defarge goes Bloomsbury, a series of dissident embroideries made in response to Woolf’s writing. Andrea will be embroidering live at the forthcoming conference, in alignment with its theme, ‘Woolf and Dissidence’!

Two works respond to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 classic novel, Orlando: A Biography. Jane Hyslop’s artist’s book, The Oak Tree: a tribute to eternity, comprises a series of drawings and pochoir prints inspired by the novel and Can Akgümüş’ Yâdigar I (Keepsake I) and Yâdigar II (Keepsake II) create a rich dialogue between Orlando and two eighteenth-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour.

We’re particularly excited for our very own Michelle Abbott’s 4 Beautiful Obscenities of Virginia Woolf, which forms part of an ongoing project of abstracted sewn insults, reinventing Woolf’s own insults through embroidery. Alongside her work as an artist, Michelle works as Senior Research Coordinator (Events) within the Media, Arts and Humanities Research Professional Services Team. She has been a key player in the planning of the conference, and so it is extra special that she has made both a significant creative and logistical contribution to the event. 

Reflecting on the experience, Michelle told us, ‘It has been a lovely project to work on from a Professional Services side, organising and logistics, and to be a part of the creative side. It is a collaborative project, but there is a lot of personal in there too'. Describing her work, Michelle shared that ‘I've used a lot of purple as it was Woolf's favourite colour, and because of its associations with feminism. The words are not as abstracted as much of my other works, as Woolf would want you to hear these insults. These were not to be hidden or quiet. They were meant to be heard.’ 

Pressing Matters coincides with the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway, and is a featured exhibition of the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf taking place at Sussex in July! Co-hosted with King’s College London—two sites with strong Woolfian connections—the conference runs between the 5th–8th July 2025. It promises an exciting schedule of events, including paper presentations, panel discussions, performance, and extra special activities that include visits to Charleston, Monk’s House and Towner Eastbourne for Hope Wolf’s Sussex Modernism exhibition. 

We’d love to hear and see your responses to these fascinating works. Use the conference hashtag #Woolf2025 and/or #WoolfandDissidence.

Pressing Matters has been supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) and by funding from the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities.

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