Abstract

“Responding to Rome” at the Estorick Collection (Catalogue ISBN 0 904152 49 9) selected by artist and curator Jacopo Benci. The exhibition was organised by the British School at Rome and received funding from the Henry Moore Foundation. Based on exhibitors who have lived and worked in Rome, the curation reflected diverse visual practices and revealed the deep relationships between Rome and the development of contemporary art in the UK. The exhibition questioned the nature of Rome and looked for reflections of the cities diversity through the fractured lens of contemporary art. Artists as diverse as Mark Wallinger, Susan Trangmar and Alison Wilding were shown to have connections to each other through the situation, culture, history, or plurality of Rome. The cited research is the wax sculpture ‘Aegis’ exhibited on an 18th century chair shipped from Rome. This sculpture was made for a historic Lutyens hallway, and the sculpture’s removal to London gallery, and positioning with/against other relevant art work was a furthering of the conversation between sculpture, culture and architecture that is one aspect of my research. The output develops previous research undertaken as Rome Scholar in 1999, (Arts Council Funded, catalogue available), where I explored classicism and contemporenaity through visual forms which spoke to ‘Italianicity’ (Barthes), ‘Englishness’ and to the search for the sculptural ‘original’ often identified as Greek or Roman. The sculpture ‘Aegis’ undertook a strategy to explore the possibility of the impossible and the palimpsest of history embodied in plastic form: that Athena (of classical Athens) remove her aegis, sign of her invulnerability, in Rome (now) and cast it aside, forgotten, on the 18th century chair of one English experience (The Grand Tour). Suddenly vulnerable, Athena becomes invisible, perhaps lost in the cultural and historical melee; only her Aegis remains, a post-modern baroque remnant.