Prunella Clough's 'Structures of Mysterious Purpose': Abstraction and Post-Industrialization

Catherine Spencer is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of St Andrews. Her research and teaching interests focus on performance art since 1960, technologies of mediation, and feminism; she has published articles on these areas in Art History, Tate Papers and Oxford Art Journal. She has also written on abstraction and the legacies of modernism, including essays on the painter Prunella Clough for British Art Studies, and the work of Jay DeFeo in Tate Papers. With Jo Applin and Amy Tobin she is the co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960-1980 (Penn State University Press, 2018). Catherine has recently been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a book project on the relationship between performance art, counterculture and sociology, and will be on research leave from January 2018-September 2019.