When preparing to co-host our Art+Feminism edit-a-thon ahead of International Women’s Day 2025 at Trinity College Library, Una Watters’s painting “Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain” (1959) came to mind.
Una Watters was a painter, illustrator and designer born in 1918 in north county Dublin. Watters attended the National College of Art with the encouragement of Maurice McGonigal. As a part-time art student, she juggled classes with her day job as a librarian.
She exhibited frequently in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s and featured in numerous Royal Hibernian Academy and Oireachtas shows. Watters won an Arts Council Award in 1965 for which she produced her well-known work “Claíomh Solais”. The image became the emblem of the 50th-anniversary commemoration of the Easter Rising. Despite her success, many of her paintings went missing and thus she disappeared from Ireland’s art history for a period of time when she should have been a mainstay.
Many works by the Irish artist, have disappeared.
Similarly, Hilary Heron, the Irish modernist sculptor who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956 was sidelined out of Irish art history. Although she was celebrated and talked about (often about her good looks or ‘controversial’ behaviour thanks to stereotypes galore) during her lifetime, her legacy and appreciation for her artwork and talent disappeared after her death.
These are not isolated events, unfortunately, and in the art world, it is very common that women artists are not as celebrated as their male counterparts.
Recently, to launch Art+Feminsim 2025 in Ireland we spoke to artist and activist Pauline Cummins on the Wikipedia Community Ireland podcast. She gave us insight into her experience trying to carve out a place for herself and her fellow female artists in the 80’s. She saw how Women artists were being sidelined from galleries and their work was less likely to appear in public collections. Unfair access to resources and funding, along with other societal challenges lead her to become a co-founder of the Women Artists Action Group in 1987. She joined the European efforts to increase the visibility of woman artists, on the international stage.
Listen to the Podcast with Pauline Cummins here.
Although the situation is improving, there is still lots of work to be done to tell women’s stories, restore their professional reputations and honour their artistic legacies as they rightly should be.
What if we had the power to create a more equal and inclusive digital space? What if we do?
Taking a feminist approach to making the internet a more equal, collaborative and safe place to be also means amplifying the voices of anyone who has been marginalised from the canon of knowledge. Today the vision of Art+Femininsm extends to amplifying the work and stories of artists from gender minorities and indeed all underrepresented groups.
That’s where we can take a stand as digital activists. At Trinity, lead by Wikimedian in residence Professor Sae Kitamura (University of Tokyo), as a group we empowered ourselves to edit and create as many articles about underrepresented artists as possible to celebrate International Women’s Day.
Events like this give us the opportunity to gather as digital activists to take small steps towards amplifying marginalised voices, dismantling unfair power imbalances and fostering more safe and inclusive digital spaces for all.
The event kicked off with a presentation from Laura Shanahan, Head of Research Collections at Trinity Library. She demonstrated how the library has been working toward making its archives open-access and making its collections more inclusive. She showed the example of the Cuala Press Collection which dates back to the 1910’s under the direction of the Yeats sisters. She also provided participants with editing inspiration introducing the audience to artists such as Annie West, The Wynne Family, Mainie Jellett, and Evie Hone who are all connected to Trinity College. She also highlighted the work of playwright Rosaleen McDonagh, a Trinity alumnus.
She celebrated Trinity’s first female Provost Linda Doyle in her presentation which included a photo of Doyle in front of a statue of former Provost George Salmon. The words of former Provost George Salmon are still infamous in Trinity: “Over my dead body will women enter this college”.
“Over my dead body will women enter this college”.
Then Professor Kitamura gave the audience a crash course in Wikipedia editing and insignt into how Wikipedia is not immune to the gender gap in information. She explained how articles concerning women are much more likely to be nominated for deletion and how only 16% of Wikipedia editors are female, which inevitably leads to bias.
The event was a great success and we created four new articles and edited 10 articles on Wikipedia in four languages (Japanese, English, Irish and Dutch). This was a remarkable result for such a small group of seven people!
Together we improved and edited articles about
- Una Watters
- Hilary Heron
- Edith Blake
- Eileen Barnes
- Nano Reid
- Henrietta Van Pee
- Daisuke Nagai
- Yasuko Uetake.
It just goes to show even a small group event can empower people to take action as digital activists! Thank you to everyone who participated and helped to make this event happen. If you are affiliated with a gallery, library, archive, museum or cultural heritage group and would like to learn more about digital activism and Wikipedia editing please feel free to get in touch!
