Faces of conflict - Walter Yeo Facade by Paddy Hartley
Collaborative exhibitions
RAMM works with the university to bring the best of research and collections to Exeter. This is best seen in collaborative exhibitions between RAMM and researchers. Summaries of past collaborative exhibitions are below with more information on the past exhibitions pages.
Collaborative exhibitions – Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History
Dr Rebecca Langlands and Professor Kate Fisher from the Centre for Medical History’s interdisciplinary project Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History, collaborated with RAMM on an exhibition planned in 2014.
The exhibition, Intimate Worlds, featured loans from Wellcome’s collection of sexual artefacts housed at the Science Museum.
Collaborative exhibitions – Faces of Conflict
Professor David Houston Jones of the University of Exeter worked with Thomas Cadbury Curator of Antiquities at RAMM on the Faces of Conflict exhibition. Based on Professor Jones’s work as joint lead with Professor Bernard Devauchelle (Institut Faire Faces) on the EU INTERREG IV-funded project 1914FACES2014.
The University Project Team
The university team consists of Professor Jones Associate, Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture, Cristina Burke-Trees, Curator/Project Co-ordinator, Marjorie Gehrhardt, Associate Research Fellow in French and Suzanne Steele, literary advisor.
About the project
We take the experience of the facially injured soldiers of the first world war as the starting-point for an enquiry into disfigurement in the broadest sense, arguing that facial injuries in 1914-18 led to both unprecedented innovations in the surgical field and to permanently changed understandings of the face. Just as artistic practice fed into surgical practice (in the work of sculptors as mask-makers or epithesists), so the radically new forms of surgery developed at this time changed the context in which artists represented the face. Looking at art-works and historical objects from the early twentieth century to the present day, we look both at the unique historical situation of facially injured soldiers in world war one, including the complex question of their social (re)integration, and the long-term cultural legacy of that situation.
The exhibition creates a dialogue between works created during and immediately after the first world war (works by Henry Tonks and Otto Dix) and contemporary work by René Apallec, Eleanor Crook and Paddy Hartley. Paddy Hartley is artist in residence in the College of Humanities, University of Exeter, as part of 1914FACES2014.
The collaborative exhibition
Faces of Conflict is the result of collaboration between RAMM’s exhbition team lead by Thomas Cadbury Curator of Antiquities, and the university team of Professor Jones, Cristina Burke-Trees, and Marjorie Gehrhardt.
It is hoped that the exhibition both complemented plans at RAMM for commemoration of the First World War centenary and fee into wider dialogue in Exeter and the South West concerning the legacy of the war. In particular, the therapeutic and memorial practices which grew up in its aftermath. The exhibited work included a combination of historical items (drawings, watercolours, photographs, life masks and medical records) and contemporary art-works.
Collaborative exhibitions – Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic
The collaborative exhibition Art and Soul ran from November 2014 to April 2015. It linked to Identity, Community and Victorian Medievalism in the South West funded by the AHRC. The Victorian subject matter was the basis of a collaborative evening debate and day-school hosted by RAMM in March 2012.
Medieval misericord from the Harry Hems workshop
University of Exeter contacts:
Dr Corinna Wagner and Dr Joanne Parker from the Department of English, Centre for Victorian Studies
RAMM contacts:
Julien Parsons, Senior Collections Officer; Thomas Cadbury, Curator of Antiquities