Filioti, Danae Elizabeth; (2025) Enchanted Relief: Constructive Women Artists in Britain 1950-1980s. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

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.

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