This PhD critically examines thirty years of television art practice by women artists and producers in the UK. The research aims to question and challenge women’s TV art in the mainstream broadcast sector and trace its development to the present date as moving image and its future manifestations including streaming and social media. This PhD also places these questions in a historical context, surveying the often-overlooked developments of women artists’ TV art exhibition, production, and intervention. The research was developed from qualitative email interviews with women TV artists and three key UK-based female TV arts producers, as well as critically writing many original case studies on women artists’ experimental practice. Alongside the six chapters and the conclusion, I have researched and written a substantial case study chapter on Tamara Krikorian, a forgotten modernist pioneer female TV artist and ‘sculptor of the air’. Moreover, to summarise my outcomes and highlight what is new and significant about my findings, I have identified a new field of practice based on experimental broadcast interventions interrupting or intervening the flow of mainstream television by women artists and producers from 1971 to 2024. More recently, there are also feminist interventions in streaming viewed on Netflix and MUBI alongside mainstream and experimental films. Two other key findings of my research are firstly, a critical case study of Tamara Krikorian, an early modern pioneer video and TV artist and ‘sculptor of the air’ who has been unrecognised and ignored by women TV art producers and the art world. Secondly, I have located and identified women TV art producers that have been acting as enablers and collaborators with male and female TV artists and this collaborative liaison has made the work a more democratic working practice and process. My research ultimately reveals the results underpinning my rationale and research questions and what they mean. An art historical approach to women’s TV art can result in innovative and experimental findings outside the mainstream due to an attention to form and substance and the context of the TV artworks. It has done this by applying new paradigms and examples to a feminist reading of the history of TV art, and since my work is feminist and qualitative, as a result I have developed a feminist qualitative paradigm. This has made a socio-political and art historical worldview possible. |