Girlhood & Art

I'm Claire Marie Healy, I'm a writer and I'm the author of a new book with Tate called Girlhood. For me, the more that I've been researching and thinking about girlhood, the less I've thought about it as a prescribed length of time. It feels like something that we carry with us well into womanhood and you know I would also see it as very much inclusive of LGBTQ identities, and something that we sort of share aesthetic and emotional associations around, but that we also have particularly personal and poignant experiences.

When it came to this Tate project and looking through the national collection of art, I really wanted to start with quite a simple point really. There are hundreds of works that are simply titled Portrait of a Girl, it made me think about the status of girls. What does it mean to be recognised, and feel represented in art? Part of that is a kind of naming.

Another key thing in terms of how I've been thinking about girlhood is this idea of how images of girls circulate. You'd have to be a daughter of the elites to be painted and the likelihood is that portrait may have been sent to some other family when you're being married off. It does make you think about how much and how speedily the images of girls will travel today. I really wanted with this book to explore the ways in which girlhood is not only inherently traumatic or a difficult time, but also it is this time that is quite charged with a kind of powerful potential creativity.