Mary Frances Gormally is a Visiting Research Fellow in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England.
Mary is an Art Historian, a specialist in nineteenth century British Royal Iconography and feminist interventions in art histories and art practices. She is a critical commentator on the historical past and contemporary present in couture and fashionable dress designs, labour, writings, curating and exhibiting practices. Mary is an authority on the work of the international fashion designer Dries Van Noten. For over 36 years Mary has taught the histories and theories of art, feminism and art practices, theories of visual culture and material culture, specifically in the fields of twentieth and twenty first century fashion and textile design histories and creative practices. She has taught at Bristol Polytechnic / UWE; the University of Bristol, the Open University and the Institute of Higher Education, Cardiff.
Mary’s long established research interests are in representations of the mother-daughter relationship, its complexities and contradictions inscribed in letters, autobiographies, art histories and literature. Since 2014 her research work lies in matters of curation and exhibition practices. Her work contributes to contemporary international debates that question curatorial narratives and the work of couture and fashionable dress exhibitions in contemporary cultural life.
Mary currently is combining research work in the V&A photographic archives and the Bath Fashion Museum garment archives. Her work challenges the limits of visual cultural analysis and works towards fostering new frames of critical engagement in writing, curating and exhibiting practices. Mary argues that the subject matters of couture and fashionable dress, the political, material, aesthetic, economic, lie at the centre of contemporary debates in visual and material cultural studies.
