Research is important to my practice both in understanding the painters who have preceded me and the social history that is the facts of everyday lives. Overshadowed by the outbreak of The Great War in 1914, the Edwardian period is closely associated with the lengthy Victorian period that preceded it and encompassed much change. Named for Edward VII, but including with his brief reign from 1901 to 1910 the first years of George V as King, the Edwardian marks the last period of centuries of progressive social development before the emergence of the social modernity that developed during the 20th Century. In expressing myself as a woman of the Edwardian i have been drawn to the year 1904, some three-score-year-and-ten before i was born, when mourning for the late Queen has passed but the more clearly defining Edwardian traits have yet to develop. It is a lull within a period that can be thought a lull between the Victorian and the Modern, and a largely overlooked period of British history. It is an elegant time now seemingly far removed from our lives today, though the insights and emotions of individuals are much the same for people are still people despite culture changing about them.
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The Edwardian saw the birth of my Grandmother and through my relationship with her i was able to make a direct connection with Then. I have found a deeper level of understanding of Then from those details that are not recorded in history books and rarely in letters and diaries. It is through direct experience of Then that these details have come to light and both inform and influence behaviour. The sum of these is the fabric of a life, the making of a life as independent personal artistic expression. I seek to know as much as possible of the life of a middle-class woman living by her own means in the early years of the 20th Century. To marry the facts of that social history with my own aspirations and impressions is to travel in time and evoke Then Now. I dress and conduct myself as an Edwardian Woman, not a particular woman from history, not a generic woman of that time and not a character as in play or film. I am Me, i am Me Then living Now, the project is Me Then Now. In establishing about me the potential creative stimuli of another time, while a product of Now i seek to produce work as a person of the past living in the present, a mirror on contemporary culture by making apparent our social history.
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Anna Sullivan
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Artist, 1904
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I offer correspondence with those that wish to know more of Me Then. Please make initial contact with a short personal introduction via this address: anna@anna-id.co.uk
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