Andrew Hazewinkel

This large leather screen brings seamlessly together photography and sculpture which are the two principal fields of activity that define Hazewinkel’s artistic practice. The two late nineteenth century silver prints that provided the images used in the creation of this artwork were uncovered by the artist in a solander box labelled Suspicious, Fakes and Forgeries in the largely overlooked John Marshall Photographic Collection, held in custodianship at the British School at Rome Archives.

The small photographs depict, in recto and verso, a marble statue (considered by experts as a ‘fake’ antiquty) representing Omphale, a little known Lydian queen best known within European cultural contexts as the slave owner of Herakles. The narrative most often associated with the powerful Eastern queen Omphale revolves around her insistence on an exchange of clothing and gendered roles with the hyper masculine Greek hero; and it is that narrative only that seems to have captured the European imagination historically.

Omphale has become an enduring a source of interest for Hazewinkel who has created several artworks exploring what he refers to her as ‘her inherent doubleness’ and her ‘persistent, pulsing, presence’, appearing, disappearing and reappearing again throughout the longue durèe of the Western/European art historical tradition.

Suspicious Marble (Omphale) considers some of the historical antecedents of the entangled relations between presence, power, agency and control, within genderfluid contexts. Alongside these concerns, the work further explores another lonstanding research theme in the artsist’s practice, being the relationships between the materiality of things, the body and 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. Rescaling the original images to approximate human dimension, and printing them onto the skins of other animals, Hazewinkel establishes a materially triggered conceptual framework to help us understand 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, Hazewinkel points toward the concept of material semiosis (founded in contemporay archaeological theory’s Material Enagement Theory), wherein the meaning of a material emerges from the conceptual blending of one’s physical and mental responses to it during context-specific engagements with it.

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

^{Photographed by Zan Wimberley}