Please join us for the second part in our symposium series. Christine Finn, British archæologist, professor and artist, will be presenting film and images from her decade long study of bog body, the often-haunting, sometimes disturbing, preserved remains of 2000 year old people from Northern Europe. These finds, the result of chemical transformation, go beyond scientific data to provide inspiration for the arts, including the poetry of Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney.

Christine will argue that the finds bristle with creative tension and a means of articulating both personal and universal emotion. She will also show how this understanding enabled her to take on a more intimate - and continuing - art project, centered on her family home in south-east England. This art structure within a structure offered an unexpected ambiguity which further develops the idea of liminal, ambiguous, space as a creative resource emerging out of everyday domestic materiality.

Details

Date: Saturday, November 22nd

Time: 6 pm

Location: Casale Santa Brigida, Calvi dell’Umbria, one hour from Rome, two hours from Florence

Address: Loc. Santa Brigida 3 Calvi dell'Umbria (TR) 05032

Driving directions: click here

Following Christine's presentation, we invite you to continue the dialogue over apertivo and dinner for a suggested donation of 10 euro.

About Christine Finn

Christine is an influential BBC journalist turned Oxford archæologist, whose fascinating work includes an archæology of Silicon Valley. She was a reporter at 16, a woman's editor at 17, and left her TV newsroom after a Reuter Journalism Fellowship at Oxford University, to return for a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, and a doctorate on poetry and archaeology.

She now works as a freelance journalist, presenting on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and contributing to, most recently, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, New Scientist, British Archaeology, the V and A magazine, Ready Made, and Slow Food. Her books include Past Poetic and Artifacts: an Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley, of which she is writing a sequel from many thousands of miles on the road and rail in the US. She is biographer of Jacquetta Hawkes, and is possibly the only Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries with a thing for vintage computers.

RSVP & Questions

Please send an email to info [at] artmonastery [dot] org

2000 year old bog bodies by the Danish photographer Lennart Larsen, Left: face in profile of the Tollund Man, Right: hand of the Grauballe Man, courtesy Lennart Larsen/Nat.Museum of Denmark

Left: Christine Finn, Right: Detail from the excavated room from the domestic art project, Leave-Home-Stay, 2007