Performing Politics: Art, Gender and Activism in the Glasgow School of Art Archives

How have the women of Glasgow School of Art performed acts of resistance in response to an industrial military complex of the 20th and 21st century?

Taking a focus on women's involvement in anti-nuclear and peace activism, the PhD project will centre forms of political engagement that were instigated by GSA students and staff, and how this is evidenced, and made accessible, through the GSA Archives & Collections. Stemming from my interests in activism, art and performance, the research methodology will identify specific women and non-binary artists recorded in the archives through their Peace activism.

Artists already emerging from my early research are Ann Macbeth, Helen Biggar, Kino Film Group, Ciara Phillips, Anne-Marie Copestake, Sam Ainsley, the Glasgow Girls, Lucy Reynolds, Hannah Frank. This initial grouping interests me as they represent different political incentives. I will seek to find examples of unique anti-military activism emerging from Scotland in urban and rural places.

I will ask, what was it about the context of GSA (and more widely Scotland) that may have stimulated political engagement in peace, and what were the reactions of the art school management to this activism from the 19th century to the 21st century?

Identifying peace activism will open discussion around different aesthetic and design methods used by artists/activists to resist militarisation. Recent history of the past twenty years has been widely characterised by protest and the performance of an individual's politics in relation to a mass. Creating some kind of legitimacy through defining one's body as a site of consequence.

The largest protests in the UK have been against the Iraq war in 2003 when one million people marched in London. Scotland has a long history of protest and a strong CND presence. How can art historical methods pick apart these images of protest? How can a record of protest be understood both as art work and agitprop? (ref 1)

Protesters at Greenham Common showed a precocious aptitude for visual activism, knowingly mobilising women's crafts with all their ambiguous connotations as a form of intensely antimilitarist and anti-masculinist resistance. Alexandra Kokoli, 2021.

There is a wealth of art historical engagement with the aesthetics of protest and women's collectives as site of radical organising in the late 20th century, particularly around the relatively recent history of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camps. I would like to explore an earlier period of activism of the early 20th century during the two World Wars - relating the archives of Helen Biggar and the Glasgow Girls.

This will help to form an understanding of women as political subjects during less widely contested periods of militarism and to understand the particular visual activisms used.

I seek to engage with both urban and rural contexts. Peace and anti-military activism often take place directly in the sites of industrial military production, often located in rural locations. Their presence changes the experience of people living in rural geographies where the sounds, sights and repetition of military activity are ever present.

Communities are heavily influenced by the military. Peace activism may look and sound very different to a central urban environment. This distinction will help to define forms of political engagement and which materials are drawn on from the Archive.

The uncatalogued objects, artworks and papers in the GSA Archives forming the basis of the thesis, are core to what makes this research new and unique. My aim is to work with the GSA Archives team to initiate ways of making uncatalogued objects accessible for the first time and to instigate new narratives of Scottish art history to include women artists engaged in Peace activism.

Public engagement will be core to my research methods (e.g. events, workshops or exhibitions), to understand how the records identified resonate with people's contemporary experiences and