Barbara Hanrahan’s prints are unruly cosmologies.

Her work is full of bodies crowded with flowers and text, suburban family mythology rubbing against sex, religion, popular culture and grotesquerie, decorative surfaces that keep turning psychologically inside-out. Alison Carroll’s monograph traces the development of that visual language from Hanrahan’s early Adelaide training through her formative years studying printmaking in London and the major periods of work that followed.

For Hanrahan, the domestic, autobiographical and bodily recur obsessively, but never quite innocently: mothers become monuments, women split into multiple selves, American pop imagery collides with Victorian ornament and family photographs mutate into elaborate personal mythology. Carroll follows these shifts across etching, drypoint, woodcut, linocut and screenprinting, with the book generously reproducing Hanrahan’s work throughout. Hanrahan is now represented extensively in major Australian collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of South Australia. 

A particularly good early monograph on one of Australian printmaking’s genuinely singular figures — and increasingly difficult to find in the ordinary trade edition.

Wakefield Press, Netley, South Australia, 1986. First edition. Large-format paperback. 108 pages, extensively illustrated throughout in colour and black and white. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing/marking to covers and edges; internally clean and bright. Very good condition.