Coral Woodbury and Claudia Tobin discussed Coral’s most recent project, Revised Edition, which rectifies the complete erasure of women artists from the first 29 printings of Janson‘s History of Art. First published in 1962, it became the defining art history text of the twentieth century, shaping the Western canon and understanding of art for generations. And yet the text did not mention a single female artist until 1986. With Revised Edition, Coral inks portraits of women artists on pages torn from the book, making visible those who have been obscured. She describes herself as a “historian, gazing backward, and as an artist, creating anew” whose works “are a way to heal the injustices and omissions of art history”. Recognising that women were vital contributors yet excluded from the record both in their own and subsequent times, Coral reclaims space for them. Bringing women together across time and place, she re-recasts and re-crafts the story of art.
Coral and Claudia explored key influences and events which have informed Coral's work, including her museum career with work at the Newport Mansions, documenting the untold stories of the domestic service; her travels to Cuba and Nepal which inspired the Havana and Himalayan Colours series and the universality of loss which led her to explore themes in her paintings around healing and the beauty in the broken places.
