16 Facts About Barbara Hanrahan

Barbara Janice Hanrahan was an Australian artist, printmaker and writer whose work featured relationships, women, women's issues and feminist ideology.

Barbara Hanrahan was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1939.

Barbara Hanrahan went on to study a diploma in art teaching from Adelaide Teachers' College, while taking classes at the South Australian School of Arts.

In 1963, when Barbara Hanrahan was 23 she moved to London to take a break from teaching tertiary art in Adelaide.

Barbara Hanrahan furthered her studies at the Central School of Art in London.

Barbara Hanrahan lived mostly in England until the early 1980s, with her partner, sculptor Jo Steele.

Barbara Hanrahan lectured for a time at the Falmouth in Cornwall and Portsmouth College of Art.

Barbara Hanrahan kept a diary in her late teenage years, and then again in London to make sense of a strange city.

Barbara Hanrahan began writing her first book, The Scent of Eucalyptus, a semi-autobiographical consideration of her childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in Thebarton, shortly after the death of her grandmother in 1968.

Barbara Hanrahan's edited diaries were published in 1998, revealing less than favourable comments about many of her contemporaries, although some friends and colleagues commented that it was interesting to understand how Hanrahan's brain worked.

Barbara Hanrahan was a painter and printmaker, experimenting with printing styles such as screen printing, etching, relief printing, and woodblock and lino cutting.

Barbara Hanrahan's work is personal and private yet its themes are universal, portraying relationships between girlfriends, women and men, and the struggle against societal structures.

Barbara Hanrahan exhibited her artwork internationally, including in London, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, Scotland, the United States and Canada.

Barbara Hanrahan's artwork is collected in numerous galleries in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia.

Barbara Hanrahan's books were just as expressive and confronting as her artworks.

Again it is both fictional and autobiographical, Barbara Hanrahan using a main character similar to herself.