Talks

24 January 2025

10am – 5pm

In-person tickets are now sold out for this event however online tickets are still available via the online conference page. If you would like to join our waiting list for in-person tickets please email press@mkgallery.org with the subject title Vanessa Bell Conference WL.

This one-day conference in MK Gallery’s 150-seat Sky Room auditorium includes an exciting line up of experts and enthusiasts and will also be live-streamed online. Tickets to the conference will include entrance into the exhibition Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour.

Click here to download the Vanessa Bell Conference Programme

Contributors

Dr Rebecca Birrell is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews and writer of This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Dr Grace Brockington is Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. She is a specialist in modern British art, with particular interests in the connections between art and theatre, internationalism and literature. She has written on Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury Group, particularly in relation to the peace movement in the First World War.

Dr Darren Clarke is Head of Collections, Research and Exhibitions at the Charleston Trust. He has curated several exhibitions including Orlando at the present time (2018), and Post-Impressionist Living: The Omega Workshops (2019).

Rob Gifford is a cultural activist and co-curator of StonyWords, an annual community literary festival in Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes.

Dr Wendy Hitchmough is emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The Bloomsbury Look (Yale, 2020) and former curator at Charleston (2001-13). She is the author of a forthcoming book, Vanessa Bell. The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale, 2025).

Megan Hunter is a prizewinning novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. She is the author of three novels: The End We Start From (2017), which was adapted into a feature film, The Harpy (2020) and Days of Light (forthcoming in 2025). In September 2024 her dramatic monologue Salt of the Earth premiered at Venice Film Festival. This contribution is generously supported by the Calliope Arts Foundation.

Dr Hana Leaper is Reader in History of Art and Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She completed her PhD Vanessa Bell and the Significance of Form in 2014.

Dr Sophie Pickford is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge whose current research focuses on the cross-cultural interaction between the Bloomsbury Group and the Ballets Russes in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Frances Spalding is an art historian, biographer and cultural historian. Projects include the biography Vanessa Bell (Bloomsbury, 2006) and an exhibition on Virginia Woolf (National Portrait Gallery, 2014).

Dr Stephanie Taylor is Emeritus Professor at the Open University, Milton Keynes, co-author of Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work (Routledge 2016), co-editor of Gender and Creative Labour (Wiley-Blackwell 2015) and author of Narratives of Identity and Place (2009).

About the exhibition

Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was a pioneering modernist painter and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of influential English artists, writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour at MK Gallery – her largest-ever solo show – provides an in-depth overview that includes drawings, paintings, ceramics and furniture.