Madam, - I found the recent series Arts at the Crossroads (The Irish Times, March 3rd-7th) stimulating and apposite. However, the near invisibility of women artists in the series was most disturbing. To highlight a few examples:
1. The illustration accompanying the first article in the series showed the faces of eight male and zero female artists within an outline map of Ireland. (In an article that named 19 male artists and all of three females, surely even one female face could have been included in the illustration?)
2. Four of the five articles in the series had a boxed item on an individual artist's life: only one of the artists thus featured was a woman.
3. There was a distinct male preponderance in the images of artists' work or artists at work in the series.
4. Four of the five articles were written by male critics. Ironically, the last one (on theatre, by Karen Fricker) was on a spread facing a feature article marking International Women's Day. The contrast between the pictures of all male actors in the main panel of illustrations on the Arts page and the women's faces on the opposite page was stark.
These examples raise a number of questions. Are there simply more male Irish artists than female? Are Irish women artists not achieving the same level of national or international critical acclaim as their male counterparts - and if not, why not? Is there a gender bias in the representation of artists in the Irish media? Do women artists - and indeed women arts critics - have to "punch above their weight" to make a mark? Is the lack of acclaim/visibility something to do with the way the way women artists work or the forms of artistic expression they chose and how these are viewed by the media and the public?
Perhaps The Irish Times could explore some of these questions in a future Arts feature or series and your staff could review the gender balance in the choice of illustrations accompanying such features. - Yours etc.,
RACHEL McNICHOLL,
Marlborough Road,
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4.