Rosa Branson: Art, Life and Education

Rosa Branson: Art, Life and Education revolves around the question of how the artist Rosa Branson has become who she is and what her manner of becoming in and through art suggests. The book that is the culmination of this project is situated as a politically oriented feminist project of re-imagining women as historical subjects in which writing about lives and history are political acts oriented to changing the future. The focus is on art practices that work with and across times and places and continue to frame how Rosa lives and works and how she engages with other artists desiring to paint. Each chapter plays on the double meaning of the “work of art”. Each attends to the visual nature of Rosa’s art within a visual-narrative matrix while also focussing on how art as work is entangled with Rosa’s life. Each chapter also discusses a debate or dilemma that emerges through Rosa’s story.

Rosa Branson: Art, Life and Education provides an innovative approach to life writing by interweaving visual, textual, material and oral sources with insights from a range of cultural and philosophical texts. It portrays Rosa’s life in art and engages with her art by aligning art practices with a view of life writing as topology. In attending to the spatial, local and situational “writing” of a life in visual art, topology also enables relations of power/knowledge and desire to emerge as important threads in Rosa’s story, in the paintings she produces, in her work with students, and in her engagement with artists through the Worlington Movement.

Rosa Branson: Art, Life and Education revolves looks at how the artist Rosa Branson has become who she is. The book that I am writing focuses how Rosa practices art and how that frames how Rosa lives and works and how she engages with other artists desiring to paint.