Confirmed Speaker abstracts A-G

 

Rachael Allen: The body beyond the anatomy lab

Bearing witness to corpses ‘in the flesh’ is rooted in the cultural history of human anatomy and dissection. For 21st century medicine, whose ethics determine the display of anatomised bodies to be limited to ‘neutralised’ scientific and scholarly contexts[1], first-hand experience of dissection has become a guarded professional ritual that depends on the violation of the taboo (access to the interior of the body and to death). Why then, am I here in the anatomy lab as an artist if my role is other than to integrate artistic methodologies to profit education?

 

Drawing on my experiences as artist in residence in anatomy laboratories, and my broader practice investigating anatomical material to explore the dead body, I discuss how my research inside the lab is wholly valuable to generating lines of enquiry about the anatomised, pathologised and medicalised body in contexts beyond the lab – the foreign body, the vulnerable body, the dead body, the operative body, the body as material – which become subjects (and objects) for my visual artwork. I argue that the visual arts should not be a means to an end of humanising medical practice – a defining movement of medical humanities – but be pioneering in interdisciplinary collaborations to offer new ways of thinking about the body aesthetically, ethically, politically and globally, in life and death.

 

[1] Ludmilla Jordonova, ‘Happy Marriages and Dangerous Liaisons: Artists and Anatomy’, in Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordonova, The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997), pp. 96

 

Rachael is is a visual artist in Newcastle (UK). Her visual artwork and research explores the interface between human sciences, medicine, anatomy and the arts, practicing under the umbrella of medical humanities and independently, nationally and internationally. Researching as Artist in Residence at university anatomy laboratories, the artist develops methods of integrating arts methodologies into medical education alongside practice-led research investigating the dead body. Allen has recently become an End of Life healthcare assistant to fulfil her ambition in caring for the dying, whilst embedding her artistic interest in the physiological, emotional and spiritual aspects of death, dying and disposal. Her work can be viewed at http://www.rachaelallen.com/ and http://rachaelallen.com/section534836_626063.html

 

Sara Arfanotti: The representation of the hermaphrodite body in art; from renaissance till contemporary 

Hermaphrodite is a symbol of coexistence of both sexes in a unique body. When the modern science of anatomy began to rise in the 16th century, there was little if no distinction between sex and gender. One would think that under the leveling influence of the anatomist’s knife, social divisions between men and women would melt away. Gendered characterizations continued to inform the ways in which anatomists approached bodies of either sex. This was also true in the great tradition of anatomical illustrations that emerged in the 16th. Representations of dissected cadavers were as much defined as Renaissance artistic, religious and cultural tastes regarding gender as they were by medical discoveries. Ulisse Aldrovandi with Monstrorum historia represent the multifaceted minds which seem to have been characteristic of the Renaissance. In 19th Century, academic research has focused instead on addressing the underlying monstruosities ridde beneath small anomalities. The most evident example is Lombroso’s research on criminals: discovering the natural monster that identifies the criminal attidude. With the origin of photography and the approch to 19th the medical photography gradually substitute the illustrations and the use of ceroplastic. Nadar with his series of photographs of a young Hermaphrodite is the most important exemple of connection between art and science. Some contemporary artists contributes, by demolishing a standardized classification over gender definition, like Peter Witkin with his works on freaks, portraying corpses and body parts, and Mike Kelley with his Hermaphrodite Drawings that can be linked at Ulisse Aldovrandi’s tables. Strange enough, one of M.K quotes, can be borrowed to symbolize the role that intersexual contition played during the centuries. "We're living in the postmodern age, and all I can really do now is work with this dominant culture and flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it".

 

Sara is a researcher and assistant professor on the Anatomy for Artists and Phenomenology of the Body for the MA Degree in Design and Management of Artistic Exhibits at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. She is a blogger for the Virgilio Sieni dance company and co-curator of the cultural association for contemporary art projects in Florence. She is a passionate lover of contemporary art, and has a deep interest in the relationship beetween anatomy and art. She has a Fine Arts MA.

 

Roberta Ballestriero: From the ‘Plague’ to the ‘Vanity of the Human Glory’:the “Theatres of Death” of Gaetano Giulio Zumbo

Born in Syracuse in 1656, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo probably learned the art of ceroplastics in Sicily where there was an old tradition of wax nativities. Famous for being the original inventor of anatomical wax modelling he’s also remembered for his masterpieces known as ‘Theatres of Death’ still on display at La Specola Museum, Florence. These gruesome tableaux portray death and disease and convey a general sense of decay and the precariousness of life that seemed to please him: Zumbo depicts, with a relish typical of his time, the process of deterioration of the flesh with the meticulousness of an anatomist and the taste for the macabre absorbed from the culture of Mannerism and the early Baroque. These macabre compositions are probably the result of a mixture of the old tradition of votive offerings and works of religious nature and the Neapolitan 17th century painting depicting the plague. The Dantesque and convulsed imagery of Zumbo much aroused the interest of writers and philosophers. Since its creation the “Theatres of Death” have greatly influenced many writers among which Marquis de Sade was the only one who showed some appreciation. This paper will explore, through a visual analysis of the pieces, the historical, artistic and scientific importance of Zumbo’s “Theatres of Death”. In order to understand these tableaux, the influence of contemporary art environments, patrons and the interaction between art and science will also be taken into account.

 

Roberta is an associate lecturer in History of Art for the Master of Art & Science, University of London. From 2013 she has been the Art Historian in residence at the Gordon Museum, London. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, Italy and had her European PhD from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Her research concerns the history of Ceroplastic and wax figures throughout the centuries, including anatomical models, portraits, ex-voto, wax sketches and contemporary art.

 

Maria Barroso: Death for Life: corpses and sacred bodies - berengario da carpi breaking a taboo

Since Prehistory, deceased were carefully buried, conveying after life beliefs and the sacredness of corpses. This attitude regarding death and corpses has been kept in ancient and primitive societies. The consequence for the living was that living bodies couldn´t be incised. Aside India, traumatology ensured most surgical procedures. Exceptions are castration of male genitals in Oriental royal courts, and circumcision, performed as an iniciatic rite in pharaonic Egypt. Neolithic trepanations appear to have been performed to solve traumatic brain injuries.

In the Hippocratic Corpus (around 400 B.C.), internal anatomical structures are named. Anatomical knowledge was limited, but far more extensive than in ancient Egypt. Pharaonic corpses were utmost sacred. Embalmers just pulled out the internal organs. Doctors studied anatomy by dissecting animals. The Greeks openly challenged this taboo in the Alexandrian medicine. But Herofilus (335-280 B.C.) and Erasistratus (310-250 B. C.) dissected corpses and bodies of convicted criminals. This practice was much frowned upon and utterly condemned by Celsus (25 B.C.-50 d.C.). Galen (A.D. 129-161) dissected on dogs and pigs. Furthermore, the anatomical dissection, advocated by the dogmatic sect of Herofilus and Erasistratus, was not followed by other medical sects that dispensed it. On the importance of the bodies and their burial, we should just think of the Sophocles’ Antigone, who died to give a proper burial to her brother Polynices. But for doctors and especially for surgeons, to dissect human bodies was the only way to understand ailments, diseases, and find ways of treatment. This paper revisits Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1460 -1530), a surgeon and anatomist, a pioneer of the anatomical revolution and illustration, who definitely started to break the taboo, conveying living images of skeletons and dissected bodies, correcting past errors, and portraying anatomy as an unavoidable path for the benefit of the living.

 

Maria is a former GP, as well as a poet and literary essayist. Her poetry books have been published in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. As a Medicine History Researcher, she is a Board member of the Department of the History of Medicine of the Portuguese Medical Association, a Researcher at the Lisbon National Museum of Archeology. Her research fields, within which she has numerous publications in Portugal and abroad, include ancient medicine, bezoar stones and ancient lithotherapy, Roman surgical instruments, ancient gynecology and obstetrics, and gender studies.

 

Richard Barnet and Kass Boucher: Literary Responses to a Modern Transi

Anglophone poetry's obsession with death has been widely discussed - but much less has been said about its preoccupation with the scandalous, troubling physicality of the dead body. In this session poets Richard Barnett will read and discuss a selection of poems that take the dead body as an image or metaphor, and explore the connections between these literary responses and Eleanor Crook’s modern transiThe evolution of anatomical imagery in contemporary culture. 

 

Richard is a writer and broadcaster on the cultural history of medicine, and a poet. Seahouses, his first collection, was published by Valley Press in 2015, and was shortlisted in the Poetry Business awards, judged by Simon Armitage. He received one of the first Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowships, and teaches the history of disease and the history of evolutionary theory at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His first history book, Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures, was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and his The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration, was described by Will Self as 'superbly lucid and erudite'. His latest book, Crucial Interventions: An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practice of Nineteenth-Century Medicine, is out now. Find him online at richardbarnettwriter.com.

 

Kass teaches Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. In 2015 she won first prize in the Winchester Writer’s Festival poetry category and was shortlisted in the Four Corners International Poetry competition. She has also taught Creative Writing in HMP Winchester and worked with the Playing for Time theatre-company, prisoners and students from the University of Winchester to stage theatrical productions in the prison

 

Derek Bunyard: Dr. Gunther von Hagens’ Sentimental Education

Wikipedia’s entry for Dr. von Hagens indicates that the four Body Worlds exhibitions have received more than 26 million visitors.  The first took place in 1995 and since then the exhibition of whole bodies ‘plastinated’ in lifelike poses and dissected to show various structures and systems of human anatomy has aroused both interest and controversy in more than fifty cities around the world.  Von Hagens now employs some 340 people in five laboratories in four different countries.  In 2002 he staged a public dissection in a London Theatre with an audience of 500 supplemented by being broadcast on Channel 4.  In 2005, a four-part series entitled Anatomy for Beginners shown on Channel 4 featured von Hagens and Professor of Pathology, John Lee, dissecting a number of cadavers and discussing the structure and function of many body parts; a four-part follow-up screened in 2006 - Autopsy: Life and Death – showed von Hagens and Lee discussing common fatal diseases with the aid of dissection.  In 2007 a three-part programme entitled Autopsy: Emergency Room showed what happened to the body in injury, featuring also presentations by the British Red Cross, von Hagens work introduced an eleven part series for the History Channel – Strange Rituals – in 2009, and finally, on Easter Sunday in 2012, Channel 4 showed von Hagens presenting his interpretation of the Crucifixion.  Why is this work of such public interest and concern?  Perhaps the answer rests on some essential aspect of human nature – excited as much by public executions and the opening of the Grand Duke’s La Specola (1771) as by von Hagens’ exhibitions.  The paper tests this view using Foucault’s theory of cognitive épistémès and Rancière’s notion of perceptual emancipation.

 

Derek's research largely features some aspect of representation and his present interest is in algorithmic interpretations of psychoanalytic processes. Previous contents have ranged from the mathematical and scientific uses of analogy and metaphor in Primary and Secondary Education, the analogies used to describe the developmental processes typically featured in Early Childhood Studies, and the uses of certain photographic illustrations and practices as stimuli for Final Study tutorials in Fine Art courses. He teaches on the undergraduate programme for Modern Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester, and the areas of specialism he features on this course are Aesthetics, and Tragedy – the latter consisting of a three part programme – one module per year – variously titled ancient ‘canonic’ tragedy, utopia and tragedy, and modern tragic lives.

 

Matthew Carlos: Emaciated Buddhas: Death, Duty, and the Anatomy of Enlightenment 

Even if my body is parched to destruction with flesh being utterly decayed and bones dried up, I shall never rise without attaining the enlightenment of the Buddha. -  Puyaojing 普 曜 經 (T186, 3:515b).

 

The Pāli Canon - a set of texts defining the variety of Buddhism most familiar in Britain - characterises the path to Enlightenment as avoiding extremes of austerity as well as sensual indulgence. Why is it that some of the earliest and most striking artistic representations of the Buddha portray him, in remarkable anatomical detail, as a living corpse, the result of asceticism that brought him to the cusp of death? Although sculptures of the emaciated Buddha are recorded across the North of the Indian subcontinent (notably Kashmir, Burma, Nepal, and Bodgayā - in what was the Mauryan Empire c305 BCE), the highest concentration of these artworks is from the first centuries of the common era in Gandhara - an ancient area that served as the crossroad of Greek, Indian, and Chinese culture in what is now Pakistan. While most scholarship interprets these sculptures in light of Early Buddhist and later Mahayana traditions, this paper examines these perplexing sculptures not from the perspective of Buddhist institutionalised narratives, but rather from Buddhism’s source (archē) in the intense ascetic disciplinary practice and philosophy of Iron Age śramaṇa monks. It postulates that such an extreme state of body and mind - analogous to the Auschwitz Muselmänner, and once considered to provide access to supreme enlightenment (annutarasamyaksaṃbodhi) - remains important for contemporary Ethics of Integrity, and provides an important counterweight to the gentle, commercialised image of Buddhism popular today. This paper is an adjunct to a multi-year research project into the Iron Age sources of the Buddhist, Jain, Ajiviaka, and other related religious schools currently being undertaken with funding from the Sobota Foundation in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at University of Oxford, and at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

 

Matthew is a Philosopher, Conceptual Artist, and Religious Studies scholar whose specialities include Contemporary Continental and Ancient Philosophy, Monasticism, as well as associated architecture and horticulture. He teaches and conducts research in Oxford, supervises doctoral students in London and Switzerland, and has exhibited at Winchester Cathedral and the Tate Modern.

 

Aaron Casley: Freud in the Flesh

What impact does the death of the artist have upon the reception of their work? Lucian Freud was an artist who was intrigued by the lives of those who sat for him. He famously dedicated a great deal of time to getting to know them and it was important to him that he liked them. His fascination with life manifested itself most strongly in his studies of the flesh, in which the lives of his subjects seem to permeate through their skin. There is a strong sense of intimacy between the painter and his subjects, as well as a certain vulnerability which was also often typical of his work, and which one imagines may only have been able to emerge due to the building of these bonds, these living relationships. When Lucian Freud died in June, 2011, many institutions immediately displayed a selection of his works in tribute to his life. These mini exhibitions represented a new phase in the life of the work, one in which the viewer may now only ever experience the work after the artist’s own life has ended. This paper attempts to understand how the artist’s death may influence the way their art is received, also how Freud’s own study of the flesh could only have been achieved by recognising that it was a flesh he shared with his subjects, what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty referred to as “the flesh of the world”, a shared sense of life which is now dead.

 

Aaron is a first year PhD student from the Department of Theology, Religion and Philosophy at the University of Winchester. His undergraduate degree was in Continental Philosophy at the University of the West of England (2004-2007) and he later completed his Masters degree in Music as an Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Barcelona (2012-2013). His Masters thesis was a phenomenological enquiry into the philosophical foundations of soundscape research, design and composition, and inspired the idea for my current project entitled The Place of Art, a phenomenological investigation into the relationship between place and the work of art.

 

Ivan Cenzi: Cadaver Mirabilis: Rome’s Capuchin Crypt and the bright side of memento mori

The iconography of death in the Late Middle Ages was delicate and poetic: in sculptures and frescoes, the dead were often represented with their eyes open, transfigured in a celestial dimension. This was bound to change by the end of the XIII Century, when a legend of unknown origin made its first appearance in Europe: the encounter of the Three Living and the Three Dead. One of the very first realistic representations of a human corpse, this literary and artistic theme predates the danse macabre by a century. From then on, the practice of memento mori became a constant in Europe, the incarnation of the haunting Havel havalim found in Ecclesiastes; the artistic depiction of death followed accordingly, adopting an increasingly graphic approach through the centuries (the Death and the Maiden theme, the Three Ages of Man, etc.).

 

The Capuchin Crypt in Rome, although built in the post-Renaissance period, is strictly connected to the Medieval idea of death, and draws its inspiration from Saint Francis’ Canticle of Creatures (circa 1224). This charnel house, decorated with the same bones it is charged with safeguarding, was arranged as an eschatological tour in six stages: the visitor first experienced a real-life encounter with the Three Dead, then proceeded through the crypts, richly adorned with allegories and symbols, and eventually ended his journey contemplating the reward of eternal life. Studying this extraordinary example of cemetery art can help us to understand how the concept of memento mori, beyond its grim aspect, actually maintained transcendence and hope as its ultimate goals.

 

Ivan is the author of a series of books exploring Italy’s hidden macabre wonders. The first three volumes are dedicated to ancient sacred spaces which allowed a contact between the living and the dead: The Eternal Vigil explores the Palermo Catacombs, hosting the world’s biggest collection of artificial mummies; De Profundis explains how in the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples the believers were able to have a dialogue with the souls in Purgatory; Mors Pretiosa examines three of Italy’s main religious ossuaries. He is also the curator of Bizzarro Bazar, a blog centered on all things strange, wonderful and macabre (http://bizzarrobazar.wordpress.com/).

 

Amy Chan: Death in Postdramatic Theatre

“The essential thing about theatre is transformation. Dying. And the fear of this last transformation is general, one can rely on it, one can depend on it.” Heiner Müller, the German playwright renowned for his postmodern and postdramatic theatre writing, has once made a remark on death and theatre, which is particularly true for postdramatic theatre. The notion of postdramatic theatre was established by German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999 summarizing the tendencies and stylistic traits of contemporary theatre since 1960s. As understood from this conceptual framework, new postdramatic performances of “more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information” step out of the traditional narrative and dramatic form of theatre.  This paradigm shift from representation to presence, the bodily co-presence of performers and audience, and the emphasis on the liveness and shared experience in postdramatic performances re-propose and challenge the urban perception and perspective of death, for which death has been sterilized and isolated from the daily living of contemporary media society.  The author would elaborate further on death and contemporary performance in the context of postdramatic theatre in the form of presentation performance with live excerpts from two of her own original works, The Hong Kong Plague of 1894, a site-specific performance in a heritage medical museum inspired by the deadly historical event, and Morbid Anatomy, a performance-in-progress inspired by the anatomical specimens and pathology museum in the history of medical education, and current anatomical pathology practices.

 

Amy is a Master of Fine Arts lighting design student of Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, a postgraduate diploma graduate in East/West Theatre Studies (the University of Hong Kong, 2001), a theatre practitioner and a practicing pathologist. She has been actively participating in theatre productions as lighting designer, director, performer and playwright since 1991, including an award-winning museum installation in Hong Kong Arts Biennial 2003. Her most recent work is the interdisciplinary performance and installation project The Hong Kong Plague of 1894 as co-creator, co-director, scenographer, curator, and installation artist. Her upcoming site-specific solo performance Morbid Anatomy will debut in September 2016 in a hospital pathology teaching laboratory.

 

Emily Cock: Unmerciful Medicine or a Merciful Death? Empathy in Seventeenth-Century Surgery

This paper will examine prescriptions of restricted empathy toward the patient who was dead, dying or at risk of death, in surgical training texts of the seventeenth century. It will consider the variant types of empathy (usually described as pity, sympathy, etc) observed in and prescribed for the trainee and experienced surgeons in order to understand the shaping of this emotional community and their attitudes toward terminal and deceased patients. A key focus will be the surgeons’ evocations of the Roman writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus’ (c25BC–50AD) prescription for the ideal surgeon in De Medicina, in which he advised that the surgeon should be a young to middle age man of steady hand, and that while he must sympathise with his patient in order to wish to help him or her, he must not be so overcome by pity for his patient’s pain that he instead abandons them to a slow death. The paper will focus on the works of Alexander Read (c1580–1641), who enjoyed the unusual position of being a member of both the Barber Surgeons Company and College of Physicians. Read was a respected surgeon who delivered lectures in the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall that he later published, rendering him an influential figure in seventeenth-century surgical education. Read’s library is also preserved at the University of Aberdeen and includes his annotations on others’ texts, allowing a broader understanding of his surgical philosophy and understanding of the emotional prescriptions for men in the field.

 

Emily is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Winchester on the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Effaced from History: The Disfigured and their Stories from Antiquity to the Present Day’. Her research focuses on the medical practice, patient experience and popular representation of head and face medicaments and surgical procedures in early modern Britain. Emily holds a PhD in English from the University of Adelaide, and taught in the Discipline of English and Creative Writing. She was the 2014 Bill Cowan Fellow of the Barr Smith Library, the 2007 John Howard Clark Scholar, and received the 2013 EW Benham Prize for the best doctoral thesis on literature written in the English language at the University of Adelaide. Emily is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS).

 

Eleanor Crook: Carving Guy: Mortality for the medieval and modern mind

Eleanor Crook discusses the genesis and ongoing sculpting of the first Transi tomb carving to be made in nearly 500 years. To the contemporary mind the theological belief system behind the Transi genre is obscure and unfamiliar but this does nothing to diminsh their emotional impact, fascination or intuitive understanding as a major symbol of our fear of death and regrets about bodily frailty. The production of a modern day Transi involved a number of iconographic, technical, stylistic and anatomical lines of research as well as a study of traditional carving techniques which are little changed since the 1500s. Sculpture using ancient techniques raises questions  about handmaking and lost craft skills in a context of computer generated 3d form and the appropriation of the craft skills of others in the contemporary art world. The anxiety of the place of consciousness in the mortal and dying body is a recurring theme in art and in the work of this artist in particular and the theme of the Transi becomes a focus for meditations on memory, identity and survival.

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Eleanor is a sculptor of effigies and figures with a particular interest in mortality and the line that separates the living  from the inanimate. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy and now works in wax, carved wood and lifelike media. She has also made a special study of anatomy and has sculpted anatomical and pathological waxworks for the Gordon Museum of Pathology at Guy's Hospital, London's Science Museum, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. She exhibits internationally in both fine art and science museum contexts. She is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum of Pathology at Guy's Hospital, a member of the Medical Artists' Association, runs courses in Anatomy drawing at Bart's Hospital, Guy's Hospital and Camberwell School of Art, and lectures for the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, Forensic and Medical Art Msc at Dundee University, Biomab Belgium, Morbid Anatomy Europe and Hunterian Museum London. She teaches anatomy, forensic and anatomical sculpture intensively at the summer courses for Oxford Univerity's Ruskin School of Art and regularly lectures and collaborates with the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, the Narrenturm Pathology Museum in Vienna and the Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn.

Following a lifelong interest in Northern Renaissance woodcarving, and influenced by the experience of dissecting in order to learn anatomy, she studied traditional figurative limewood carving at the Geisler-Moroder wood carving school in the Austrian Tyrol where the technique has been honed for generations.

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Fiona Davies: Death and Art stream

Chris Townsend in his book Art and Death (2008) states 'We know death not as an experience or event, rather as what comes after'. Simon Critchley expands this by his opinion that 'Death is radically resistant to the order of representation. Representations of death are misrepresentations or rather representations of an absence'; a comparison here could be through Derrida's proposition that it is death that gives representation its power.  In these arguments there appears to be an understanding within contemporary art theory that we all know what death is. This paper will question this assumption in the context of the representation of medicalised death, i.e. a death that involves a high level of medical intervention in a hospital and in particular in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). In that context there can be a dislocation from an understanding that death is inevitable as one comes  to terms with the idea that a pink breathing body maintained in that state externally, while looking alive could also be considered to be dead. Looking at the art works of the visual artists, Carol Jerrems, Annie Leibovitz, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, plus myself, this paper will explore and seek to understand representations of this specific form of death, the medicalised death.

 

Fiona is currently enrolled in a practice based PhD programme at the University of Sydney in Australia. Her education includes a B.Sc (Textile Techology) UNSW a B.A (visual Arts UWS and an MFA from Monash. She has worked as a visual artist for over twenty years and has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. These exhibitions include a solo exhibition Blood on Silk; Farnham in the James Hockey Gallery at the UCA Farnham in 2012.  This was followed by exhibitions in the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi in Georgia, Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney and Tufts University Boston USA.

 

Caroline Diezyn: “To tell the todus theropon with tung were ful tere:” Transi Tombs, Toads, and Luxuria in Medieval Poetry

Unlike English transi tombs, that of François de la Sarraz in Switzerland (late 14th century), and later German examples (1450-), feature the decaying corpses of the men they memorialize crawling with snakes and toads. The description of the ghost of Guenevere’s dead mother in The Anturs off Arthure (late 14th century) as having exposed bones, tattered clothing, and being covered in toads and snakes, is uncannily similar to this particularly gruesome type of transi tomb. Similarly, the Disputacioun Betwyx the Body and Wormes depicts a dream vision of a conversation between a woman’s body and the worms eating it within the grave (vividly depicted in an illumination accompanying a Northern England version (ca. 1435-40).

I intend to argue that the unusual representations of dead noblemen in continental transi tombs and descriptions of dead noblewomen in English alliterative poetry both have their roots in traditional images of luxuria. Transi tomb imagery and epitaphs that condemn a luxurious lifestyle specifically include toads, changing the message from a simple memento mori to a commentary on luxuria. When allegorized, Luxuria is often depicted as a woman devoured by toads and snakes as punishment for her sin. The Anturs and the Disputacioun, therefore, present a specifically feminized iteration of the transi tomb imagery. Their appearance draws on the memento mori tradition of the transi tomb, but combines it with the more specific representation of Luxuria, who is not just licentious but also vain and covetous.

 

Caroline is an English Literature PhD candidate at Western University in London, Canada in the Deptartment of English and Writing Studies, and is writing a dissertation on nostalgia, melancholia, and the occult in American literature.

 

June Douglas: Caribbean Medicinal Practices Surrounding Death

Medicinal practices in the Caribbean have incorporated Western techniques and pharmaceuticals in theory for the last 200 years but in reality traditional methods of healing, beliefs and practices surrounding death that originated with Caribs and Arawaks and were brought in through slavery from Africa and India are still practiced. Practices surrounding death continue although the origins and reasons are sometimes forgotten. Prior to elaborate funeral homes and preservatives, ice was used to preserve the body that was kept in the home waiting for burial. The water that ran from the coffin had special qualities!  It was used to scare children. A child sucking their thumb was threatened with the dead water! An overly successful bakery was said to be using the dead water to mix with the dough! Small children were passed back and forward above the coffin, to either pass on good spirits or ward off the bad ones.  Photos and mirrors were turned around in the house of the dead and during the procession to the grave, radios were turned off and all doors were close; private and business. During the burial if a female participant had their period or if somebody had a cut they must not allow the soil from the grave to touch them.  How did these practices transfer into European practices and vice versa? Were they practical or merely developed through fear of the unknown and repressive religious practices?

 

June studied English at Westminster, London, Brunel & Nottingham & Trent and taught in schools and colleges for 16 years before moving to Grenada W.I. where she had been traveling for ten years; she subsequentlymarried a Grenadian. She moved down to live in the mountains and started teaching at St. George's Medical University. She has been studying the use of spiritual and herbal healing practices and isinterested in the practices surrounding death, where and how practices originate and how they transfer to the West. She has also attended the Oxford Blood project 2014, Southampton's Art of Compassion 2014 and Lisbon's Narrative and Medicine with Rita Charon & Brian Hurwitz 2015.

 

Emily Evans: The evolution of anatomical imagery in contemporary culture

We are currently in a time when the use of anatomical imagery within the creative industries has never been so apparent. The appearance of anatomical references in the popular culture has dramatically changed over the last two decades. The general public are more self-obsessed and self-aware than ever. This coupled with the increase in use of social media for image sharing has led to people being interested in their bodies and anatomy has benefitted from that trend. Only a few years ago, it was a struggle to find pieces of artwork or products that referenced anatomy. Presently, if you search for ‘anatomical heart’ products on Etsy, there are around 2,500 results.

It cannot be underrated the shock element of anatomy and it’s association with death and the unsavoury. This reaction coupled with one of intrigue and fascination has helped the expansion of the use of anatomical imagery. It is a subject that lends itself to being used in a shocking manner to evoke a reaction in the audience to a piece of work. This tension between intrigue and fascination, coupled with our own mortality is a place where preconceptions can be challenged. The association of anatomy being macabre or grotesque is one that I challenge in my work. I see anatomy as life rather than death, and with my art practices in recent times, I try to challenge peoples default reaction to anatomical images as being squeamish, by reframing it such as in my book ‘Anatomy in Black’ where anatomy is depicted as glamorous. Alongside teaching anatomy to medics and illustrating academic textbooks, I also work to take anatomy out of the classrooms, and allow it to be accessible to all, thus enthusing new generations about anatomy.

 

Emily is an antomical illustrator and a senior Demonstrator of Anatomy at Cambridge University, teaching the medical students human dissection and anatomy. Following her degree in Anatomy and Cell Biology and subsequent training with the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain, Emily has been working as a full-time freelance Medical Illustrator for the last 12 years and works from her studio in London UK illustrating anatomy texts. Emily is also author and illustrator of ‘Anatomy in Black’, a coffee table book of anatomy, owner and designer at Anatomy Boutique, ‘Anatomist and Artist in residence’ at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, New York, USA. She is also a Member of the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain and the Institute of Anatomical Sciences and a guest post writer for Street Anatomy.

 

Roberta Fusco: Putridaria (strainer room) and draining practices of the bodies. Anthropology of death in the modern age

In Northern Italy there are some particular structures funeral, denominated in the critical literature “putridaria” (strainer room), associated with particular funeral practices diffused in Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These structures, which are normally placed in crypts under the churches, allowed to intervene in the processes of decomposition and were functional at prolonged treatment of the corpses. After death the bodies were  placed in these environments, on particular seats, called strainers, (used to desiccate the bodies, eliminating the bodily fluidsand),remained there until the body was completely skeletonized and free of from soft tissue. Following the complete drying the body underwent a second burial, often accompanied by new funeral. The purpose of this research is to propose an interpretation on the intended use of these structures facilities and the universe ritual, ethics and religion to which responded, through the examination of archival sources and anthropological investigation of the remains. This type of structures were also found in other Italian regions, especially in southern Italy, where, however, the practice was intended to mummify instead skeletonized scheletrizzare bodies. These buildings reflect the concept of death in terms of duration and second burial, developed by Hertz[1994] and Van Geenep[1981]. Concepts that seemed to have been eradicated from the Catholic Church and instead have stood in the heart of Europe Modern. There is also reason to believe that such structures, although it is missing a critical literature about, they spread to other areas of the Mediterranean, the Spanish monarchs still use for their burials in the Escorial monastery structures identical to putridaria identified in Italy.

 

Roberta holds a bachelor’s degree in archeology and she received her Master’s degree with honors in 2013 in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnolinguistics Ethnology at the University Ca 'Foscari of Venice, with a thesis entitled "The perception of death in the church of San Bernardino alle ossa; a historical anthropological approach". In 2014 she earned a first level master in Bioarchaeology, Paleopathology , Forensic Anthropology . She is currently working on a PhD in Intercultural Humanities at the University of Bergamo . Project title, Putridaria practices and draining of the bodies . Anthropology of death in the modern age”. The main thematical cores deal with the analysis of cultural control of putrefaction, after-death practices on the body, interaction between alive and dead after burial. 

 

Francesco Maria Galassi: Morphology and Pathology of the Temporal Artery in Artistic representations

Since the Renaissance, the temporal artery has been represented in pictorial and even sculptural representations with the greatest care. It is a cranial vessel, a branch of the carotid artery, whose depiction, on account of its somewhat striking windy turgidity associated with old age, adds a certain degree of gravitas to the severe facial traits of portrayed male characters. The temporal artery, however, when patently turgid may well represent one of the most prominent signs of a temporal arteritis, a rheumatological condition whose symptoms may include headache, fever, and anorexia/weight loss and even blindness. In a considerable percentage of patients, this is also associated with polymyalgia rheumatica, a severe rheumatological condition affecting several muscular and joint systems. Evidence for the existence of temporal arteritis in antiquity is scant and has only been speculated for Ancient Egypt, while a growing body of evidence - including two recently published articles identifying it in works by Andrea Mantegna and Filippino Lippi - strengthening the original observations by researchers Appelboom and Dequeker - is showing how it may have been present during the Renaissance. Depictions of very turgid temporal arteries are present both in Flemish paintings as well as in Italian ones and in certain cases it has even been possible to compare pictorial evidence with documental information on the health conditions of the portrayed characters. If alternative diagnoses are considered, atherosclerosis, arteriosclerosis or even medial arterial calcification could be taken into account. This presentation will focus on the paramount clinical importance of depictions of temporal arteries whether it be their normal morphology or when reassessing the evolution and historical presentation of diseases involving it.

 

Francesco has studied medicine at the University of Bologna, being a tutor of anatomy and graduating with a thesis in clinical neurology. After research experiences at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, he joined the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine (University of Zurich) as a postdoc assistant. His current research themes are the morphology of disease, of which a part consists of retrospective diagnoses, pathology in literary sources and pathology in art. He is also Principal Investigator of “The Italian Paleopathology Project”.

 

Rebecca Gibson: Dying For the Latest Fashion: An Examination of Morbid Corset-Related Artistry

Throughout the nearly 400 years of corset-dominated female fashion—late 1500-early 1900 CE—artists have depicted corsets as causing or representing death.  Morbidity and mortality are inherently linked to the corset in the artistic record, and in the minds of doctors from Early Modern, Enlightenment, and Victorian period Europe.   Mortality was high, and little was known about the various causes—germ theory was still centuries off in the late 1500s, and vivisection intensely frowned-upon. This work will seek to examine various tropes in the depiction of death as both female and corseted.  Was there a basis for this representation?  It will further focus on written representations of the corset as an agentive ‘bringer of death,’ and contrast that with mostly passive, non-agentive concepts of femininity during this 400-year period.  Were women really as passive as they seem in the literature, or were they the corseted death-bringers?  Toward this aim, I will be examining women’s writings and the writings of their doctors which discuss the perils of corseting and tight-lacing, in addition to the images and depictions of corseted female death.  I will also outline current skeletal anatomical research which I have done on women who corseted, showing both the deformation corsets caused to the body, but also discussing their age at death and how new data must change our ideas about their lives.  This research, unique in the field of corset studies, links the corset to distinct skeletal changes, yet confounds certain preconceptions about anatomical representations of what the corset does to women.  It has been suggested that by using the corset, women were quite literally dying, grotesquely disfigured, for the latest fashion, and this presentation will seek the historical facts behind that suggestion.

 

Rebecca is a current PhD student in anthropology at American University in Washington DC.  Her main focus on corsetry in the bioanthropological record is supplemented by many interests, including human/android sexuality, suffragette jewelry, Cold War history, and agency theory.  She has recently published her work on corset-related skeletal plasticity of the ribs and vertebrae, and is looking forward to continuing said work in her dissertation.

 

Anuradha Gobin: Picture and Play: Dissecting the Intersections of Early Modern Art and Anatomy

Early modern anatomy theatres brought together members of the public interested in witnessing the elaborate spectacle of human dissections and learning more about the interior structures of the body. Anatomy theatres were prominently featured in travelogues and advertised as tourist attractions containing exotic objects gathered from people and places across the world. These objects contributed to the spectacle associated with the procurement of medical knowledge and representations of these spaces often picture the gathered public observing the dissection taking place, engaged in conversations with each other, or in the process of interacting with the specimens dispersed throughout. My paper takes as its point of departure two early modern representations of the anatomy theatre at Leiden University and compares elements of these images to a series of prints produced by the artist Hendrick Goltzius. By establishing connections between Goltzius and the collections housed at Leiden anatomy theatre, my paper argues that the images under discussion serve as evidence of an emphasis placed not only on vision, but on the importance of spectacle and the sense of touch to the acquisition of detailed knowledge of the interior of the human body. Through an examination of what is depicted in the images under discussion as well as their formal physical properties, this paper will demonstrate overlapping methods of knowledge acquisition across medical and artistic spheres during the early modern period. This paper ultimately aims to underscore the permeability of the perceived boundaries between art and science during the early modern period.

 

Anuradha will be joining the Department of Art at the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor of Art History this July. She recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for Art.  Anuradha received her doctorate in art history at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on the visual depiction of social and cultural spaces associated with criminal punishments during the early modern period. It seeks to explore the ways in which visual culture served to mediate shifting anxieties about notions of criminality, death and the various types of medical knowledge that emerged as a result of capital sentences.

 

Bryan Green: ’the inconceivable labour of death’ (poetry performance)

when you die your body packs up

we are entangled and little by little Death drags us in, one thing we can do is grab the scythe and play a lament or a dirge or eulogy       or a love song or a rant on its shaft and blade

 

little pillow is taking a rest

with the gift of empathy we die a thousand million times

 

does no longer compute

Rene’ Magritte was a virtual pipe dream and so are we

 

Bryan, a sculptor seduced by the word Poet and a poet fascinated by the Outstanding Figure of Man, bold against a backdrop of time and space had to carve his words out of the mental block of history and mould into lost marbled wane-wax thoughts of future, he was inevitably drawn to Science after pencilling in a tiny question mark which he presently found on a different piece of paper and rubbed out. He attended Chelsea School of Art between 1972-1975. He exhibits and performs in London and Belgium and is part of the   Vitae touring exhibition. He has produced hand bound limited edition books made in collaboration with Belgian painter Robert  .

http://www.fabrica-vitae.com/bryan-green.html

http://www.fabrica-vitae.com/bryan-green-poet.html

 

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