This research addresses a striking disparity in UK public libraries: 90-95% of artist monographs feature male artists, while only 5-10% focus on female artists, despite women comprising approximately 60% of professional UK artists.

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The project systematically documents how public libraries store and display books about visual artists, revealing significant gender imbalance not only in what libraries acquire, but in what reaches public shelves versus what remains hidden in storage. Through visits to libraries across the UK, I'm cataloguing art monographs to understand the gap between what libraries hold and what the public can actually access. Early findings show that while libraries own collections of books on female artists, many remain in storage rather than on display—creating "male stacks" of visible art books and "female gaps" in what browsers can discover.

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Through a UK-wide audit, historical analysis of selection practices, and practice-led public engagement, this research will document the scale of gender imbalance, investigate how it arose and persists, and develop practical guidelines for equitable collection development.

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I've given talks at libraries including Abergavenny, inviting audiences to consider how institutional storage decisions shape our cultural knowledge and who gets remembered as an artist. I'm currently working with Seán Roberts, a researcher at Cardiff University, to develop a data collection app that will make it easier for volunteers to help document collections across more libraries, building a clearer national picture of these patterns.

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The research raises fundamental questions about visibility, canonisation, and access: How do the everyday decisions libraries make about shelf space influence which artists we encounter? What does it mean when knowledge about women artists exists but remains systematically harder to find?

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