The Collection

The women in this collection are known to us through poems preserved at Park Abbey, written to mark their entrance into religious life.

Their portraits are imagined using a custom model developed in partnership with TITLES. Taking Flemish portraiture as a visual language, the images depart from its conventions by showing the women reading, writing, studying, observing and making.

Each portrait draws on research into the religious community the woman entered. Clothing is informed by the habits and dress associated with her particular convent, abbey, order or beguinage and by the period recorded in the archive.

The date given for each work is the date of the poem that occasioned it. The place, where specified, records where the woman entered religious life. Where an alternate name appears, it is the name she took upon entering her order. The portraits interpret the women at various stages in their lives, not necessarily at the moment the poems were written.

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