Display: Helen Chadwick’s ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’ @ Henry Moore Institute

Helen Chadwick, Wreaths to Pleasure, 1992-3. Photo: c. Helen Chadwick Estate.

Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Until 17th February 2013

The Helen Chadwick: ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’ display at the Henry Moore Institute charts the creative and practical processes of ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’ (1992-3), a series of thirteen circular photographs mounted in coloured enamel frames. Each image captures a sculptural composition formed of a heady mix of substances and materials, photographed from above. Delicate flowers are suspended in transient states, poised between life and death, in a variety of organic and toxic liquids ranging from tomato juice to Windolene.

This display presents Helen Chadwick’s (1953-96) preparatory material for the ‘Wreaths’ alongside examples of finished works. It is drawn principally from The Helen Chadwick Archive, which was generously gifted to Leeds Museums and Galleries by the Helen Chadwick Estate in 2002. The Helen Chadwick Archive has been consulted by a number of researchers developing work on Chadwick’s artistic practice, and items from the collection have been loaned to museums around the world.

Call for Papers: Symbolism and the Modern Allegorical Body @ NeMLA

Marlene Dumas, Forsaken, 2011

Conference: Boston, MA, March 21 - 24, 2013; Call for Papers deadline: Sep 30, 2012

This session at the 44th NeMLA Convention, Boston, MA, will seek to explore how, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, allegorical figures in visual culture served as vehicles that transmitted traditional metaphorical
meaning, following conventions on which most educated, European viewers agreed. Yet amid the cultural upheavals of the fin-de-siecle and lasting well into the twentieth century, a transformation occurred as these established codes gave way, leading towards powerful and alternative forms of signification.   Images of allegorical bodies lost their earlier connections to conventional signification, and emerged anew in the personally inflected languages of Symbolist art and literature as the human body became an ideal expressive form for personal or hermetic layers of meaning.

Call for Papers: Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies – Genealogy, Geography, Pathogeny

University of Liverpool, 9-11 July 2013; Call for Papers deadline 28 February 2013

This conference aims to address one of the major developments in the study of melancholia over the last thirty years has been the rise to aesthetic and cultural prominence of varieties of negative emotions proposed and discussed as melancholy, including different conceptions, analyses, and portrayals from grief to insanity. Most recently, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) happens to be the melodramatic adaptation of the concept fuelled by cinematic symbols. Correspondingly, often observed as ‘a central European discourse’, melancholia has resurfaced to embody complementary or paradoxical notions not merely in the literary analysis of texts and contexts, but it has also emerged to retrieve its historical categorization. The cultural and social history of emotions entwined with modern medical and psychiatric lexicalization has opened new pathways to provide relative definitions of melancholia. However, theories about the choice of analogies for melancholy, whether aesthetic, cinematic, religious, or medical, somehow fail to distinguish the connections between contrary factors involved in melancholia.

Seminars: Things – Material Cultures of the Long 18th Century

Easter Term Seminar Schedule 2012, University of Cambridge

The Things seminar series at the University of Cambridge uses an approach based on objects to encourage consideration of the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. The group aims to re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts. The Easter term 2012 schedule continues with sessions on the following topics:

Decorative Textiles: Tuesday, 15 May 2012 with Dr Mary Brooks (York Museums Trust) and Dr Tara Hamling (University of Birmingham)

The Ship: Tuesday, 29 May 2012, with Dr James Davey, Dr John McAleer and Dr Quintin Colville (all National Maritime Museum)

The Body: Tuesday, 12 Jun 2012, with Dr Sam Alberti (Royal College of Surgeons) and Dr Simon Chaplin (Wellcome Library)

Seminars always take place on alternate Tuesdays, 12.30-14.30 during term time, CRASSH, Seminar room SG2, Ground Floor Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT.

Call for Papers: Art and Science – Knowledge, Creation and Discovery

c. Rebecca Nichols, Cauda Pavoris, 2008

Association of Art Historians, Student Summer Symposium 2012, 28-29th June 2012, The Linnean Society, London

Though their academic paradigms may at first seem diametrically opposed, the association between the arts and the sciences has survived renaissances, revolutions and beyond. This intellectual conjunction has motivated artistic practice and production throughout history, forming the conceptual nucleus of some of the most stimulating forms of creative expression. By engaging with this inter-relationship, we hope to address the assumed divisions that have kept the arts and sciences as separate areas of academic enquiry, whilst at the same time questioning if such an alliance is necessary or profitable for either discipline. As well as considering general ideas of artistic and scientific collaboration, this year’s Association of Art Historians Student Summer Symposium will investigate the interaction between art and science throughout artistic practice, theory and history. For more beautiful assemblages exploring the fusion of art and science like the one pictured in this post by artist Rebecca Nichols, visit www.acabinetofcuriosities.com

Call For Papers: Royal Body Conference

Call for Papers: Centre for the Study of Bodies and Material Culture, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2-5 April 2012

‘For the King has in him two bodies: a Body natural and a Body politic.’

The idea of the king’s two bodies, the body natural and the body politic, founded on the distinction between the personal and mortal king and the perpetual and corporate crown, has long been of interest to scholars of medieval and early modern kingship. In later centuries the natural body of the monarch remained a contested site, with the life, health, sexuality, fertility and death of the king or queen continuing to be an important part of politics. Now royal sex and scandal is the very stuff that sells newspapers, and royal christening, weddings and funerals continue to capture the popular imagination. Indeed the ‘royal touch’ of Aids victims or sick children remains a potent image. So what is the significance of the natural body of the monarch to their subjects now and the importance of it for the concept, and survival, of monarchy?