Publications

I am a visual arts scholar and academic author. My publications include books, book chapters, published essays, conference papers and commissioned reviews.

Georgina's books and chapters

Domesticity Under Siege: Threatened Spaces of the Modern Home

Editors: Mark Taylor, Georgina Downey and Terry Meade

Domesticity under Siege focuses on the home under siege as a specific and central category, and we posit that siege is an overlooked state within domestic space. Our inquiry thus marks a critical departure from ‘haven’ theories of the home and histories of domestic space. See more. Click for more info.

Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns.

Editor: Georgina Downey

In the act of enclosing space and making rooms, we make and define our aspirations and identities.

From the smallest room - the bathroom - to the spacious verandas of Singapore Deco, Domestic Interiors focuses on the modern rooms 'imaged' and ' imagined', it builds a distinct body of knowledge around the interiors, interiority, representation and modernity, and creates a rich resource for students and scholars in art, architecture and design history.

Designing the French Interior: the Modern Home and Mass Media

Editors:  Anca I Lasc, Georgina Downey, Mark Taylor

From the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, explore the importance of various media in representing and promoting French interior design.

Contributors identify and historicize the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass-produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right.  

Book chapters and exhibition catalogue essays

Downey, G (2021) ‘In quiet pursuit of a new language’: Interdisciplinary collaborations in modern Adelaide domestic interiors 1950-1960’ in Osborne, M (ed) The Adelaide Art Scene 1936-2006, Wakefield Press/Guildhouse forthcoming.

2018

Downey, G. (2018). ‘Myth, Mastery and Modernism: iconographic programming in the house museums of Gaudí and Le Corbusier’, in Marinic, G. (ed), Interior Architecture Theory Reader, Routledge,  January 2018

2015-2017

Downey, G. (2016). ‘The Novelist and the Artist: Rachilde, Felix Vallotton and shared strategies in the representation of the Decadent interior’, in Lasc, A. (ed), Visualising the Nineteenth Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, Surrey, UK

Lasc, A, Downey G, Taylor M; (2015). Introduction: ‘Connections: The Modern interior and Mass Media, Designing the French Interior: the modern home and mass media Bloomsbury, London and New York. (ISBN: 9780857857835).

Downey, G., and Taylor, M., (2015). ‘Impolite Reading and Erotic Interiors in Eighteenth Century France, in Lasc, A., Downey G., Taylor M.; (eds) (2015), Designing the French Interior: the modern home and mass media, Bloomsbury, London and New York. (ISBN: 9780857857835).

2013-2014

Downey, G. (2014). ‘Introduction’ in Domestic Bliss, Deakin University Art Gallery, July 2014 ISBN 978-0-9872954-7-7

Downey, G. (2013). ‘Bathrooms: Plumbing the canon – the bathtub nudes of Alfred Stevens, Edgar Degas, and Pierre Bonnard Reconsidered, in Downey, G. (2013). (ed) Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns, Berg Publishers, Oxford, (ISBN 9781847889317 / 9781847889324).

Downey, G. (2013). Maisons d’Artists from the 1920s to the 1980s in Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources, ed. Mark Taylor, Berg Publishers. ISBN-10: 1847889298. 

2011

Downey, G. (2011). Ethel Carrick, Emanuel Phillips Fox, expatriate communities and cosmopolitanism, in Goddard, A, (ed), Art Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and Emanuel Phillips Fox, Queensland Art Gallery, ISBN 978 1 921503 191