Andrew Hazewinkel

A melding of photography and sculpture, this large leather screen takes as its point of departure two small late 19th century photographs that depict Omphale a largely-overlooked woman from classical Greco-Roman Antiquity.

Omphale’s identity is established by the fact that she is represented with the classical attributes of Herakles. While little is known of this mysterious queen of Lydia (an Eastern Iron Age kingdom), most of what is known comes down to us through Greek mythology.

In the Greco-Roman tradition the story most frequently associated with Omphale involves Herakles’ enslavement to her as an act of atonement for his killing of his friend Iphitus. During the period of enslavement Omphale requires an exchange of their garments and a reversal of gendered social roles.

Various renditions of the ancient narrative suggest that during the period of enslavement, the hyper-masculine hero was required to wear women’s clothing and undertake activities like spinning wool, considered women’s work at the time, while Omphale, wearing his famed Nemean lion skin, wields his olivewood club and engages in men’s activities such as hunting.

Although well represented in ancient literary sources, little ancient material culture associated with the narrative survives. There is however a brief period in the history of Roman sculpture (created during the political transition from republican to imperial governance), in which we see wealthy Roman women responding to their changing legal, economic, and social status by commissioning portraits of themselves in the style of Omphale. Following this brief appearance, Omphale disappears again before emerging (albeit briefly) in 19th century European musical, sculptural and decorative arts contexts.

Alongside highlighting concerns of power and the fluidity of gender-based identity, with Suspicious Marble (Omphale) I further explore a recurrent theme in my practice - the relationships between the materiality of things,  the body and the very human act of remembering. The two archival photographic images reimagined in this artwork represent a manifestation (in stone) of soft human skin around which is swathed the skin of another animal. By rescaling the original images to roughly human dimensions and printing them onto the skins of yet another animal I have tried to set up a framework for considering how materials help us to make meaning of things, and the roles that our bodies play in generating and apprehending meaning. By presenting skin as both subject and object I am pointing toward the theoretical concept of material semiosis wherein, for proponents of archaeology’s Material Engagement Theory, a material’s meaning emerges from the conceptual blending of one’s physical and mental responses to it during context specific engagements with it.

For further detail on Suspicious Marble (Omphale) in relation to Material Engagement Theory please see my text From Limbo To Mashup and The Spell Of The Fake: Relating Contemporary Photographic Practice, The Photographic Archive and Material Engagement Theory which can be downloaded here