Omphale, Omphale a Lydian queen, Omphale and Hercules

Blending photography and sculpture, this large leather screen combines the two principal fields of activity that define Hazewinkel’s artistic practice. The small 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 John Marshall Photographic Collection, held at the British School at Rome Archives.

The photographs depict a marble statue (in recto and verso), that represents Omphale, a little known, largely overlooked Lydian queen who is best known within Western/European art historical contexts for her role as the slave owner of Herakles (as narrated  in the Greek myth that brings her down to us). The statue has been considered a fake antiquty by experts for a long time.

In Western/European contexts the narrative most often associated with Omphale revolves around her insistence on an exchange of clothing and gendered roles with her newly acquired slave, the hyper masculine Greek hero. Across painting and sculpture throughout the Western/European tradtion Omphale is represented wearing the clasical attributes of Herakles -  a lion pelt and olive-wood club.

Omphale has become an enduring research interest of Hazewinkel's. He has created several artworks exploring what he refers to her as her inherent doubleness, and her persistent, pulsing, presence, noting that she appears, disappears and reappears again throughout the longue durèe of Western/European art history.

Suspicious Marble (Omphale) considers some of the ancient antecedents caught up in the entangled relations between presence, power, agency and control within genderfluid contexts. Alongside these concerns, the work explores another of Hazewinkel's longstanding research themes - the relationships between bodies, materials and remembering.

The two archival images deployed in this artwork represent a manifestation (in stone) of soft human skin around which is swathed the skin of another animal (a lion pelt). By rescaling the original small images to approximately 1:1 human scale, and by printing them onto the skins of other animals, Hazewinkel establishes a materially triggered conceptual framework to help us better understand how materials help us to make meaning of things, and the roles that our bodies play in making 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, here

^{Photographed by Zan Wimberley, installation views photographed by Giorgos Vitsaropoulos}