Daniel Jewesbury’s new book gives voice to a frozen moment of violence
Daniel Jewesbury has spent years exploring F.E. McWilliam’s sculpture Woman in a Bomb Blast. His ongoing research has now taken the form of a unique book, utilizing dialogue in an attempt to uncover the sculpture’s complex and unsettling narrative.
Daniel Jewesbury, Senior Lecturer at HDK-Valand, has, in a way, been working on his new book Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast for over 20 years. He first came across F.E. McWilliam’s sculpture Woman in a Bom Blast at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, where it left a lasting impression on him. After publishing a small article about the sculpture in 2002 he found that he could not stop thinking about it.
“It's a strange piece of work that obviously had some kind of hook in me. I was particularly concerned with the feeling where, when you look at it, you feel a bit self-conscious, and when you look away, you feel a little guilty, like you're turning away from something that demands your attention. You look away from this young, attractive woman at the moment of her death. Others I spoke to also found it equally unsettling but could not pinpoint why it felt different from other museum pieces.”
In 2014, the Ulster Museum included the sculpture in Art of the Troubles, an exhibition on Northern Ireland’s political conflict. Daniel Jewesbury was invited to do a performance - a conversation with the sculpture. When the exhibition toured England, Daniel performed it again, realizing the idea had potential for further development. Here the idea forLooking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast was born.
Not a traditional art history book
For the past eight or nine years, Daniel Jewesbury has been working actively on Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast. What he first assumed would be a fairly straightforward work about what the sculpture evokes, its formal background, the ideas behind it, and the artist’s intent soon turned into something different.
“It took me years to come to terms with the tension between the highly sexualized figure and the violent subject matter and how the artist brings these two things together. Over time, I realized I had been thinking about the artist’s obsession, but that obsession was actually mine.”
In large part, the book is in the form of a dialogue between two characters – the writer (a detached version of Daniel Jewesbury himself) and the woman depicted in McWilliam’s sculpture.
“It is not a traditional art history book. Instead, these two characters interact with one another and the woman tries to lead the writer to insights about the sculpture. He eventually realizes some dark things about what is happening in the sculpture, things the artist may have been completely unaware of or unconscious of.”
The next stage
Daniel Jewesbury says that while Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is the culmination of many years of work related to McWilliam’s sculpture, he is in no way moving away from it. At the moment, he is planning to write an opera based on the piece together with the Irish composer Ian Wilson.
“That would be an exciting way to take the project to the next stage.”
ArtMonitor: Voices
Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is published by ArtMonitor, the Artistic Faculty’s imprint which publishes books emerging from research within the faculty, as well as Licentiate and Doctoral dissertations and working papers. It is the first book to be published as part of ArtMonitor’s new series Voices.
“The idea with the Voices series is to give a home to types of writing that do not have a home elsewhere,” says Daniel Jewesbury.
“At the moment, publishing is a difficult environment, specifically art publishing. It is hard for publishers to fund work that takes risks or does something new. ArtMonitor: Voices is meant for publications that are trying to find a form that does not already exist, or that has not been tried elsewhere. This allows us to explore new directions in artistic research and consider alternative formats for publishing work that is evolving in innovative ways.”
Woman in a Bomb Blast is a sculpture by Irish sculptor F. E. McWilliam – a part of his series Women of Belfast, created between 1972 and 1974. The bronze figure depicts a young woman caught in an explosion. It was inspired by the 1972 bombing of the Abercorn Tea Rooms in Belfast, which killed and injured several young women.