Events > Stone
Detail of the Omphalos' stone at Delphi. Image by Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
A seminar and discussion about material religion and stone. This online event will include talks by Professor Tyler Jo Smith and Jedediah Caesar.
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Talk abstracts
Dots on a Map? Carving Greco-Roman Votive Sculptures into the Lycian Landscape - Tyler Jo Smith
The Hellenistic and Roman rock-cut votive reliefs from the region of northern Lycia in southwest Anatolia have long been known to travellers, scholars, and local communities. How these sculpted and often inscribed images, carved directly into bedrock, have been understood has changed dramatically over time: by collecting them as a corpus, deciphering their inscriptions, identifying their deities, and analysing their iconography. Less attention, however, has been granted to their permanence as stone carvings, their position within the landscape, and their ability to reflect lived ancient devotional practices. Although both their specific locations and their relationship to other features (natural and manmade) have been well-mapped, such a top-down or bird’s eye view of the material is misleading and fails to recognize that the reliefs occupy sites of ritual, performance, memory and human encounter. Here we shall revisit past approaches to the rock-cut votives and propose ‘focusing in’ on them as a localized (though not necessarily individualized) ancient phenomenon of place rather than ‘focusing out’ on them as representative of the broader religious trends of their time.
Jedediah Caesar
The particular durability of stone and corresponding material qualities makes its role within sculpture and other symbolic object systems especially complex. Stone has a temporal scale that vastly exceeds cultural timeframes, a surface ideal for precise inscription, and the potential to take on new meanings by re-inscription or performative practices. Additionally, the quarrying of stone points to a reading of the material as both fragmented and whole; the quarried block is both a monumentally scaled object and a remnant of the strata from which it was removed. As an artist, I have worked through a range of material experiments and engagements with specific sites of non-art production, and in this talk I will share several projects that were conceived around the particular qualities of stone, including Gleanerstone, 2007, Hauser Coins, 2012 and Stone Underground, 2015. These projects use stone's materiality or enlist concepts associated with stone to explore how we imagine objecthood, our rituals for constructing objects boundaries, and the complex paths of agency through which materials become objects and which trouble our definitions of authorship.