Gill Perry – författare

This thought-provoking book explores the increasing visibility of women’s art in Britain, Europe and America. Considers the work of American artists Martha Rosler and Kara Walker, Irish artist Alice Maher, British artists Lubaina Himid, Christine Borland, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker, Gillian Wearing and Rachel Whiteread, and the international performance group, moti roti. Features specially-commissioned interviews with some of these artists. Covers diverse media, from sculpture and painting through to photography, installations, video and performance.

During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, whore, celebrity, muse, and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalize both the theatre and the practice of fine art. Gill Perry shows how artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner or Lawrence produced complex images of female performers as fashion icons, coquettes, dignified queens or creative artists. The result is a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. Questions the concepts of 'scholarship', 'criticism' and 'artist' across the different disciplines. Women discussed include authors (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson) actresses ( Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson) critics ( Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke) historians (Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith) as well as the writers and readers of Women's magazines, educationalists and translators. Makes a significant and original contribution to the development of gender studies by extending the frontiers of existing knowledge and research.

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces – the closet, the gallery, the library – and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses.

‘There’s no place like home’; ‘safe as houses’; ‘home is where the heart is’: ideas of the house and home are rich in cultural clichés and contradictory meanings. Playing at Home explores the different ways in which artists have engaged with this popular everyday theme – from ‘broken homes’ to haunted houses, doll’s houses, mobile homes and greenhouses. The book considers how issues of gender, identity, class and place can overlap and interact in our relationships with ‘home’, and how certain artworks disturb our comfortable ideas of what it means to be ‘at home’.While other books have touched on examples of the ‘uncanny’ and surreal presentation of houses in art, this one argues that an understanding of the role of irony and play, and the critical potential of the ‘everyday’, are equally important in our interpretations of these intriguing works. The author draws on the work of philosophers, cultural theorists and art critics to enrich our understanding of this genre. Covering the work of well-known artists, including Tracey Emin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker, Vito Acconci, Michael Landy, Richard Wilson, Mike Kelley and Louise Bourgeois, the book also looks at artists who travel across continents, for whom home is a shifting notion, such as Do-Ho Suh and Pascale Marthine Tayou. Discussing a wide range of media, including installation and film, and richly illustrated, Playing at Home is a compelling survey of one of contemporary art’s popular themes.