Dr Maria Walsh
Title
Reader - Research
College
University of the Arts London
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research
Biography
Maria Walsh is Reader in Artists' Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts. She is a writer and art critic, publishing books, peer-reviewed articles and magazine reviews on interrelations between moving image practices and feminist, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of subjectivity.Her current research explores radical forms of well-being in art practices in neoliberal and/or decolonial contexts. This research is interdisciplinary, incorporating theories of performativity and spectatorship, continental philosophy, affect theory and materialist ecology, in conjunction with research on moving image and lens-based artists’ practices.
Her recent book Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks (Bloomsbury 2020/2022) investigated how the 'screen' might act as a site of faux-therapeutic encounter in which the therapeutic is repurposed as form of critical analysis of neoliberal concepts of selfhood in the context of cognitive capitalism. This research was inspired by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s notion that we need a psychoanalytic therapeutics of technology, as well as by encounters with a number of artists’ moving image installations that addressed the machinations of performative psychological states in contemporary culture, e.g. Liz Magic Laser, Rehana Zaman, Gillian Wearing, Oriana Fox and Omer Fast, amongst others.
Chapters on artists’ moving image and subjectivity were included in the edited books: Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2011); Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (Bloomsbury, 2019); and Revisiting the Gaze: Feminism, Fashion and the Female Body (2020). Peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Screen, Senses of Cinema, Rhizomes Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Film-Philosophy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and MIRAJ. Early articles derived from her doctoral work on Tacita Dean, Chantal Akerman and phenomenological nomadic subjectivity, while more recent ones relate to her research on performative subjectivities in artists’ moving image.
She also writes regularly for Art Monthly, including artist interviews, features and reviews, art criticism being an important means of engaging with research material, as is her editorial work. She is currently Reviews Editor of MIRAJ (Moving Image Review and Art Journal), while in 2015, she guest edited with Prof. Catherine Elwes the journal’s double issue special on ‘Feminisms’: Women artists and the moving image’.
Other editorial work includes the anthology, co-edited with Dr. Mo Throp, Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art (I.B. Tauris, 2015). As an extension of this research in the archive, Walsh and Throp curated the exhibition ‘CAN DO: Photographs and other material from the Women’s Art Library Magazine Archive’ at CHELSEA Space, London, in 2015. Their pedagogic concerns in this project were summarised by curator George Vasey in his review of our anthology: “Bringing together interviews, profiles and essays from the archive, the authors have done a fine job in stitching together the polyvocal concerns of the era [...] history is only valuable if it is useful to the current generation and this book offers a good place for them to start” (Art Monthly, 2016: 34).
More recently Maria co-edited a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society entitled ‘Trauma and Repair in the Museum’ with Dr. Alexandra Kokoli, Middlesex University. Published online in 2022, the issue includes a co-written introductory chapter on decolonial reparative museology from the perspective of art practice and criticism.
Much of the above relates to Maria’s long-standing research interests in feminist theory and art practice. With Dr. Mo Throp, she co-convened the Subjectivity and Feminisms research group at CCW, the main output of which was the project, ‘The Subjectivity & Feminisms Performance Dinners’, a series of dinner events that involved staff, students, and invited artists in collective feminist research exploring the mutual embeddedness of theory and practice via performative responses to key feminist texts.
She has also published in the interdisciplinary field of art and psychoanalysis. Her book Art and Psychoanalysis was published by I.B Tauris in 2012 and she is currently writing a long-form essay for the Encyclopedia of Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2024) on ‘Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Theory’.
At CCW/UAL, she supervises PhD candidates in practice-based research in expanded lens-based media that engages with the contextual fields of subjectivity, feminisms and philosophy.