A Picture of Health: Representations and Imaginations of Wellbeing and Illness
Birkbeck research students are convening this year's Association of Art Historians 'New Voices' Student Conference, 'A Picture of Health: Representations and Imaginations of Wellbeing and Illness'.
Nicola McCartney and Fiona Johnstone (Birkbeck) and Sophie Frost (Aberdeen) are convening this year's Association of Art Historians 'New Voices' Student Conference, 'A Picture of Health: Representations and Imaginations of Wellbeing and Illness', to be held at the Wellcome Trust on Friday 7th November 2014.
Keynote Speakers
- Dr Suzannah Biernoff, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London
- Christine Borland, BALTIC Professor, Northumbria University.
What is the relationship between art and health, and how has it varied across different historical periods and disciplines?
Paintings, drawings and sculptures have long played a significant role in the care and portrayal of the sick, from the sixteenth-century Isenheim altarpiece, painted for a monastery that nursed plague sufferers and patients with skin diseases, to contemporary art and medical research collaborations, outreach workshops and the art collections of modern day hospitals. Artists themselves have engaged with medicine in a number of different ways, ranging from technical illustration to expressive portrayals of the subjective experience of illness, while historical psycho-biographical readings of art and modern day biopics have perpetuated the association between mental illness and ‘creative genius’.
In recent years Medical Humanities has emerged as an important new area of interdisciplinary study. Scholars have increasingly focused on images and art objects in their enquiries into the visual culture of medicine. What distinctive methodologies can the practice of art history offer to this new field? What different conceptual models might be appropriate for considering the function and purpose of art in relation to issues of illness and health? How can art help us to negotiate our own sense of wellbeing, and what is the mediating role of the artist in this process? What can art tell us about historical relationships between doctors and patients, changing conceptions of the human body, or the representation of illness as distinct from ‘good’ health?
A call for papers will be released shortly, and further details will be available on the AAH website nearer the date: http://aah.org.uk