Bookshop Situation Series: Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast

Index welcomes you to the release of Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast, which is a unique piece of art writing by artist and writer Daniel Jewesbury, published by ArtMonitor: Voices, University of Gothenburg, exploring power, desire, looking, and artistic and erotic obsession.

A slender young woman falls backwards, blown off her feet by a bomb. Frozen in time, her bare legs stick up, her hands grasping the air. Her face is covered by a page from a newspaper. People approach to look, bending down to study the folds of her dress, the immature curve of her thigh, her neat toes, splayed in surprise.

The woman is a sculpture, made by the Irish artist F. E. McWilliam in 1974. In this bronze figure’s awkwardly graceful near-death contortions, entire histories of pain, death, sex and visual pleasure have been condensed. The book uses different voices to unravel these histories: a writer labours over his explanation of what she means, while the Woman herself offers acerbic asides. Interwoven with this is a visual geneology of the sculpture, compiled from art history, McWilliam’s scrapbooks and drawings, and newspaper reports of the bombing that propelled him to make the work.

Daniel Jewesbury was born in London, but lived in Ireland for 25 years, and moved to Gothenburg in 2017. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design. He is currenly preparing for a solo exhibition at Röda Sten Konsthall at the start of 2026, which will feature new and recent works in film, video and photography.