European Women’s Video Art: European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s

The EWVA book is the main output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project 'EWVA European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s' which focused on the under-researched area of women artists' early video experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s within Europe. The research project consisted of the Principal Investigator, Professor Elaine Shemilt (DJCAD, University of Dundee), the Co-investigator Professor Stephen Partridge and Dr Laura Leuzzi, as Post-Doctoral Researcher. The project was developed through a mixed methodology by collecting archival and bibliographical materials and oral testimonies from artists, curators, cultural entrepreneurs, conservators and producers. The documents, images and papers collected were made available through our website (www.ewva.ac.uk) in the spirit of sharing knowledge, but also promoting women artists' profiles, supporting their careers and advocating for equality in the video art canon. The book retraces some of the stories of early women artists' video experimentation in Europe, and their achievements, and features chapters on some fundamental case studies of European women artists' early video artworks to the benefit of academia and the general public. The volume includes chapters on themes and trends in early women artists' video in Europe including self-portraiture (Leuzzi), traces and the apparatus (Partridge), closed-circuit video (Kacunko), Nature/Urban (Lockhart), romance and eroticism (Cremona) and motherhood (Elwes). Some chapters focus on selected under-researched case studies from specific European regions including the Balkans (Blackwood), Northern Europe (Lorella Scacco), Poland (Kuzmicz) and Ireland (Connolly).