Assunta Ruocco with Alison Lloyd' series of photographs Romilly Crescent (1979).

The Feminist Library is a space to listen, learn and discuss ideas.

We would like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre , whose generous funding has enabled us to continue these sessions.

These events are open to the public, free to attend and will be hosted throughout 2026.

About Dr Assunta Ruocco:

Dr Assunta Ruocco is an artist and researcher based in Nottingham, and a lecturer in Fine Art at University of Lincoln, working across photography, moving image, painting, and writing, with a focus on feminist archives, digital practices, and collaborative methodologies. She completed her practice-based PhD at Loughborough University, working alongside British artist Alison Lloyd. During this time, they became friends and developed a long-term intellectual and artistic dialogue. Ruocco collaborated closely with Lloyd in the final years of her life and is currently conducting a British Academy/Leverhulme funded project on the preservation of Lloyd’s social media followers’ experiences. Her recent article ‘#insertingherselfinarthistory: Alison Lloyd’s Feminist Auto-Citation and Social Media’ (2025) examines Lloyd’s strategies for re-activating her archive of early work.

About the session:

This session will focus on British artist Alison Lloyd's early photographic works, made in Cardiff while she was a student at Cardiff College of Art between 1976 and 1979. These works were only exhibited from 2010 onwards, with some included in the recent Tate Britain exhibition Women in Revolt!. Assunta Ruocco will share Lloyd’s images alongside the artist’s writing and reflections, attending to how these works emerged through innovative experimentation with self-staging, and documenting the spaces of her own and her peers’ everyday lives.

The session will also trace how Lloyd later returned to this material through a performative use of social media. Lloyd used Instagram, and particularly the account @romilly_crescent_docs, as a way of reconnecting with Cardiff via images from her archive. The artist described this as “a really simple, secretive way of posting” driven by pleasure and enquiry, centred on work made at Romilly Crescent. By referring to specific streets, houses, institutions, and political groups, she allowed her early images to sit within the present of the city. Through engagement with Cardiff galleries, artists, political life, and everyday events, Lloyd created a space where, as she put it, people could “almost imagine” she was there.

The session will include an invitation for audience participation. Ruocco will share a selection of archival references to Cardiff locations drawn from Lloyd’s posts and ask participants to reflect on how these places resonate, whether personally, historically, or imaginatively. This collective discussion will foreground the significance of Lloyd’s archive by reflecting on what it meant for her to preserve this body of work for decades, in the absence of institutional support.

This event is free to attend, please book here to reserve your place.