AHCS Speaker Series: Kristina Huneault "Diversity: Difference, Identity and the Botanical Encounter"

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies welcomes Kristina Huneault, Research Chair in Art History, Concordia University, to speak at our annual lecture series (follow this link for a complete list of this year's speakers).

Title: "Diversity: Difference, Identity and the Botanical Encounter"

Abstract: This paper offers a philosophical exploration of the registers of sense and meaning intrinsic in botanical illustrations produced by women artists in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Canada. Beginning from the observation that visual elements of difference and repetition are key factors in the pictorial organization and appeal of such images, my aim is to participate in a scholarly conversation that has positioned botanical drawings as instruments of identity, while simultaneously suggesting a new perspective from which to develop that conversation further.

Concepts of identity have been key to understanding botanical art. From their scientific and taxonomical functions to their role as historical agents of colonization, botanical drawings have been closely linked to processes of identification, naming, and claiming. In Learning to Draw (2000) Ann Bermingham has taught us to see how the practice of botanical drawing also contributed to a specifically feminine identity during the nineteenth century. I seek to build on Bermingham’s insight, but by grounding my analysis in the images’ visual organization rather than their historical and discursive context, I am led to other, more philosophically oriented, conclusions. These relate to the ways in which botanical drawings mobilize elements of sameness and difference that consequently open a vantagepoint onto the complex experience of the feminine self in relation to the world. While, through their Latin inscriptions and controlled outlines, botanical images participate in a rigorously upheld logic of sameness, their qualities of brushstroke and seriality also instate pictorial effects of differentiation and repetition at their very core, prompting questions about the ontological primacy of identity that are pertinent to feminist thought. Through their embrace of empiricism, moreover, botanical images raise the liberating possibility that experience may exceed our preexisting conceptual frameworks for it.

Kristina Huneault is a Concordia University Research Chair in Art History. She holds an M.A. in Canadian Art History from Concordia (1994) and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester (1998), where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. She has taught at Concordia since 1999, and was the University’s emerging research fellow in 2004. At the undergraduate level, Dr. Huneault has taught the introductory course on Western Art, as well as courses on feminism, methodology, and 19th and 20th century European Art. At the graduate level she focuses on methodology and the intersection between theory and history. She teaches in both the MA and PhD programs, and has offered courses on feminism and Canadian women artists, semiotic reading practices, the philosophy of subjectivity, and the writing of art history. Dr. Huneault's approach to art -- which bridges feminism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and social history -- considers how pictorial images participate in the construction of subjectivity. How do images help us understand the self in relation to others? In her first book Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 2002) this theme was considered in relation to images of labouring women, while in her current research she is exploring the visible traces of gendered subjectivity in artwork by historical Canadian women. Recent work on Helen McNicoll (Art History 27,2), Frances Anne Hopkins (Ashgate), and miniature painting (RACAR 30, 1-2; Manchester University Press) has been funded by SSHRC and FQRSC, and relates to her next monograph: Presence Through Absence: Gender in the Art of 19th c. Canadian Women. Other published writings include articles on the public display of working women in sweated industries exhibitions (2000); images of flower sellers in Victorian culture (1998); women in British trade union imagery (1996), and the war sculptures of Canadian artists Frances Loring and Florence Wyle (1994).