Reclaiming the Archive: My Experience at the "Deviant Women" Symposium

This week, I had the privilege of presenting at the "Deviant Women: Women in Visual Arts Symposium" hosted by the Women in Visual Arts Research Cluster at Bristol University. The symposium brought together scholars, artists, and researchers to examine the complex ways women have navigated, challenged, and transformed the visual arts landscape, a gathering that felt both intellectually rigorous and deeply necessary.

My paper, "A Legacy of her Own Design: Julia Trevelyan Oman's Archive as Feminist Intervention," explored how personal archives can serve as powerful acts of resistance against institutional erasure. Julia Trevelyan Oman (1930–2003) was a brilliant British stage and television designer whose contributions were systematically under-attributed throughout her career, a pattern of gendered marginalisation that resonates across the cultural record and echoes throughout the creative hierarchies established since Aristotle's Poetics.

What struck me most during my research was how Oman anticipated this erasure and actively worked against it. Her story illustrates the broader feminist critique outlined by Parker and Pollock: that the distinction between "art" and "craft" has historically been used to devalue women's creative labour, particularly in domains like textile work and theatrical design. Oman's meticulous documentation of sketches, correspondence, contracts, and photographs wasn't just professional practice; it was strategic resistance.

The evidence is compelling. For Enigma Variations (1968), Oman conceived the ballet's central concept over a decade before production, yet published accounts often credit choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton with originating the idea. Her archive tells a different story, containing the original sketches and timeline that prove her authorship. Similarly, despite The Nutcracker (1984) becoming one of the Royal Opera House's most iconic productions, staged over 374 times, Oman fought constantly for proper attribution, even negotiating explicit crediting clauses in her contracts after being omitted from promotional materials.

The symposium itself embodied the kind of feminist intervention that Oman's archive represents. Hearing papers that examined how women artists across different mediums, from painters to performers to designers, have subverted established archival traditions was both inspiring and sobering. The conversations revealed a consistent pattern: women creating their own systems of documentation and preservation because traditional institutions failed them.

What particularly resonated was how many presenters discussed the collaborative nature of reclaiming these narratives. Oman's story continues through the advocacy of her husband Sir Roy Strong and the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, who have worked since 2005 to reinstate her integral role in British design through exhibitions and scholarly access. This demonstrates how feminist archival praxis extends beyond individual resistance to encompass institutional support and advocacy.

The symposium reminded me that archives aren't neutral repositories; they're sites of power where stories are made and unmade. Oman understood this intuitively, and her archive stands as a testament to the importance of claiming authorship over one's own narrative. Her careful curation represents "archival agency", the active terrain of resistance and recovery where lost voices can be reclaimed and dominant narratives disrupted.

In a field that has long marginalised women's creative labour, Oman's example offers a blueprint for resistance and reclamation. Her legacy demonstrates that when institutions fail to preserve women's contributions, we must create alternative systems of documentation and memory. The necessity of recognising and preserving women's creative contributions extends beyond individual justice to broader cultural understanding, when designers like Oman are erased from histories of major cultural productions, entire creative lineages disappear.

Events like "Deviant Women" create space for these recovered voices and challenge the hierarchies that determine whose creativity is preserved and celebrated. They remind us why this work matters, not just for understanding the past, but for creating more inclusive frameworks for the future.