Phallic metaphors and feminist perspectives : unsettling the Linnaean Botanical Archive through historiographic technique and studio practice

This practice-based PhD examines the entanglement of gender, botanical science, and domestic aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain through contemporary fine art methods. Taking the botanical collages of Mary Delany (1700–1788) as a historical point of departure, the research situates women’s decorative and domestic practices within broader feminist historiographic debates, responding to interpretations that dismiss them as trivial or reclaim them as subversive. Drawing on feminist historiography, material culture studies, and archival theory, the project interrogates Carl Linnaeus' (1707-1778) sexual system of plant classification, arguing that its metaphorical alignment of botanical reproduction with human marriage naturalised and reinforced patriarchal social hierarchies. Through an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates studio-based inquiry, historiographic analysis, and material culture studies, the research develops materially grounded feminist counter-archives. Decorative practices historically marginalised as craft, such as embroidery, collage, and botanical illustration, are reframed as epistemological strategies capable of critiquing scientific authority and archival exclusion. Collage, assemblage, and patterning operate both as material techniques and conceptual frameworks. Through selection, extraction, and recombination, these strategies mobilise archival fragments and biographical material to generate speculative feminist narratives. The project engages with forty-eight eighteenth-century figures as case studies, employing fragmentary biographical reconstruction to expose how gender, class, and institutional affiliation, mediated by contemporary social norms, shaped the production and reception of botanical knowledge. The resulting installations explore social, intimate, and evidential dimensions of eighteenth-century life, interrogating relational networks and hierarchies, probing domesticity, intimacy, and embodied labour, and examining archival structures, classification, and evidentiary authority. Across these strategies, the artworks perform, contest, and reimagine historical knowledge. Utilising feminised material practices as critical tools, this research contributes an original model of feminist, practice-led historiography. It proposes alternative modes of classification, authorship, and archival authority that privilege materiality, care, and relational complexity, offering new ways of understanding how historical knowledge has been constructed, marginalised, and reinterpreted.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Author dc:creator

• Griffiths, Anne

Contributors dc:contributor

• Howard, Janice
• Begiato, Joanne

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/bcj5-pg84

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:7b279512-71e3-4028-a210-a1e5948839a4:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1