Danae Filioti

PhD supervisor: Professor Briony Fer
Working title for PhD: Enchanted Relief: Constructive Women Artists in Britain 1950-1980s

This thesis presents a revisionist history of three women artists, Mary Martin, Gillian Wise and Liliane Lijn who worked with the abstract constructive relief in the post-war period through to the 80s. The main contention is that, in its positive and affective capacity to pose as an interface and hybrid between sculpture and architecture, their reliefs posed a counter tradition to the Constructive as inextricably linked to its rationalist interpretation. This is seen as cultivated in the guise of the organic, for Martin, and in the hallucinatory of Wise and in the mystical for Lijn. An emphasis is placed on the significance of a kind of mysticism, supported by New Materialist schools of thought, an aspect of geometric abstraction that has has been vastly underestimated as a cultural tendency within post-war British art. As women artists the assertion is not that they simplistically negated a rationalist model, but that they aligned in important ways with a feminist interpretative framework. Affective intersections are therefore plotted with a range of feminist thought – notably by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Susan Stewart, Teresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway, and closing on Jung’s ideas on collectivity. The thesis attempts to expand the terms of interpretation for British Constructionists, by making connections to a much larger history and geography of constructivism, and by situating it in the context of a range of theoretical figures that serve as alternative models of modernist reception.

Research Interests

Alternative epistemologies, facticity & metaphysics as expressed in art, moving-image and abstraction 20th c. to contemporary, Feminist theory & location/place/spatiality; discourse in humanities in the wider public sphere.

Conference papers

• ‘The pedagogic prompt in light of love? Lijn's Puzzles, Takis' Haunt’ Pedagogic Relations: Art and Art History, University College London, (29 February 2020).
• ‘Cutting the Cosmos: Liliane Lijn and Collage, 1960/9’, Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1900 to Now, online Workshop for New Voices and Novel Approaches, Tate Britain & Paul Mellon Centre, (13 October 2020).

Teaching

• Tutor, BFA2 Critical Studies: Defining a Field of Practice, Slade, UCL (2024-5) 
• SPGTA, Art in the Streets, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (Spring 2022, 2023)
• PGTA, History of Art and its Objects, History of Art, University College London (Fall 2020)

Additional Talks

•  ‘Sounding It: Lasting lessons from Thoreau’s transcendental ruminations in the work Rita Donagh,’ Eco-Form Workshop convened by Dr. Nicholas Robbins, Past Imperfect, University College London, (11 May 2022). 
• ‘The Limits to Growth: The Graphic Origin of Unsustainability’ Eco-Form Potluck, Past Imperfect, University College London, (10 May 2021).