Abstraction and Empathy: the Life and Art of Evie Hone with Dr. Joseph McBrinn on Wednesday 29 October 2025

We are delighted to welcome Dr Joseph McBrinn to give an an online talk on the life and art of Irish Arts and Crafts stained glass artist, Evie Hone.

In 1955, only a matter of months after Evie Hone’s death, when C.P. Curran commented that her turn to stained glass some twenty years earlier was a result of her dissatisfaction with abstract painting, he set in motion a framework of interpretation of Hone’s art that has lasted up to the present day. Many of the radical and complex ideas and sources that underpinned her work have, as a result, gone largely undetected. The aim of this talk is to map some of the key events and influences that shaped Evie Hone’s life and art and account for the international reputation she enjoyed during her lifetime that has now fallen into eclipse.

This online talk will take place on Wednesday 29 October at 7pm GMT. Ticket holders will be sent a Zoom link ahead of the event. For those not able to join us live, a recording of the event will be circulated afterwards.

Joseph McBrinn was educated in Ireland, Scotland and France and holds degrees in art history from Glasgow University (MA) and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (PhD). He is currently a Reader in Art History at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. He has published extensively on the intersecting histories of gender, sexuality and disability in modern art, craft and design and on the relation of craft to war and violence. His current book project is Evie Hone and the International Avant-Garde (forthcoming from Four Courts Press).