Barbara Hanrahan

Barbara Janice Hanrahan (1939–1991) was an Australian artist, printmaker and writer whose work featured relationships, women, women's issues and feminist ideology.

Hanrahan was also known for her writings and short stories featuring coming of age stories that were somewhat biographical.

Barbara Hanrahan was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1939.

After her father's death at the age of 26 from tuberculosis in 1940, when Hanrahan was just a year old,  she lived with her mother (a commercial artist), her grandmother, and her great aunt (who had Down syndrome).

This matriarchal household is often correctly thought of as the inspiration for much of Hanrahan's art, as well as the suburb she was raised in, the inner-western Adelaide suburb of Thebarton.

Her mother later remarried.

Hanrahan attended Thebarton Primary School and Thebarton Technical School.

Hanrahan went on to study a diploma in art teaching from Adelaide Teachers' College, while also taking classes at the South Australian School of Arts (1957-1960).

In 1960, Hanrahan began printmaking, working with her German lecturer and print master, Udo Sellbach.

By the 1960s many women were not virgins at the time of marriage, and Hanrahan's Wedding Night depicts the outdated assumption that for consummation to happen the woman must be pure.

Wedding night captures the moment of unease between the couple, with the lack of intimacy shown by the gap between them.

“Wedding night has shocked people since its creation by its refutation of romance of the event,” writes Alison Carrol.

Hanrahan’s work is described as exploring the ''“themes of society and its norms, its expectations and its conventions and how the individual fares therein - buffeted and withstanding, weak and strong.

She particularly analyses the relationship between men and women, often through their sexuality, and, as well, the relationship of the generations.

The subjects are clearly chosen, gleaned from a lifetime of careful looking, listening, reading, digesting and remembering.”''

Critic and art historian Alison Carroll draws parallels between the simplicity of Hanrahan's scenes and David Hockney's pop art; ''“Hanrahan uses Hockney, but, in her best work of the periods, she moves on considerably from him; she achieves a high emotional pitch, working with uncomfortable themes of love, family and relationships and using awkward childlike form.

The process goes far beyond the easy, self-controlled world of Pop art.”'' Carroll implies that the simplicity in both Hanrahan and Hockney's drawings are similar.

In 1961, Hanrahan won the Cornell Prize for painting.

In 1962, she served as president of the South Australian Graphic Art Society.

In 1963, when Hanrahan was 23 she moved to London to take a break from teaching tertiary art in Adelaide.

Hanrahan furthered her studies at the Central School of Art in London.

''“I wanted to try my life at something bigger.

I wanted to get away from safety and walking with little steps."'' - Hanrahan on moving to London.

In 1963, at the age of 24, she left Adelaide to study at the Royal College of Art in London.

Her first exhibition was at the Contemporary Art Society Gallery in Adelaide in December 1964.

Upon her return Hanrahan was also a member of the Australian Women's Art Movement and the Women's Art Register.

Both organisations strived for equal pay for female artists as well as increased exposure.

Hanrahan often combined writing with visual arts.

She kept a diary in her late teenage years, and then again in London to make sense of a strange city.

She began writing her first book, The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973), a semi-autobiographical consideration of her childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in Thebarton, shortly after the death of her grandmother in 1968.

These themes are constantly repeated throughout her oeuvre in prints, such as in Wedding night (1977) and Dear Miss Ethel Barringer (1975).

Both works depict Hanrahan's unease with women's roles in society, such as the juggling act in Dear Miss Ethel Barringer, of a woman having to play multiple roles at once, and her unease with society's outdated values.

She lived mostly in England until the early 1980s, with her partner, sculptor Jo Steele.

Hanrahan also lectured for a time at the Falmouth in Cornwall and Portsmouth College of Art.

During this time she returned periodically to Adelaide to teach at the South Australian School of Art and to organise her one-woman exhibitions, and she eventually returned there to live permanently.

Her edited diaries were published in 1998, revealing less than favourable comments about many of her contemporaries, although some friends and colleagues commented that it was interesting to understand how Hanrahan's brain worked.

A biography by Annette Marion Stewart was published in the same year.

Hanrahan was a painter and printmaker, experimenting with printing styles such as screen printing, etching, relief printing, and woodblock and lino cutting.

She would often revisit the same print in different styles and colours, such as Wedding Night, which has three variations.

Hanrahan's work is personal and private yet its themes are universal, portraying relationships between girlfriends, women and men, and the struggle against societal structures.