Calvariae Disjecta: the many hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall
- Submitting institution
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The University of Cumbria
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Williams1
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Artists Book and Exhibitions
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- October
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Calvarie Disjecta (CD) is an art-object, utilising a publication to explore an English folk story. The Screaming Skull of Burton Agnes Hall is an example of the persistence of an idea, and the reiteration of a narrative over many years and across many formats. CD and the accompanying exhibitions, echoes the transmission of the tale as quoted text, fictionalised narrative and oral tradition as it draws together more than 100 references across time to a story that tells us as much about cultural and historical representations. CD is published in book form (196 pages & 95 full colour images).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Williams re-presents references to an historical ghost story from some 100 popular sources across more than 150 years. The project echoes the transmission of the story as quoted text, oral tradition and downright plagiarism, drawing together many references across time to a story that tells us as much about cultural and historical representations, as it does a lurid folktale of murder, ghostly phenomena and screaming skulls. The project, both scholarly study and art-object, uses the convention, model and format of the book as a vehicle for the work. The methodology, the collection and comparison of more than one hundred accounts of the same folktale, mirrors the transmission of the story over time from one printed source to another. The collection itself, whilst providing an insight into such spectral narratives and associated cultural markers, is also an exercise in scholarly plagiarism that one might find in any anthology or literary collection, and which forms an element that refers to the materiality of language, the re-framing of extant material to generate new meanings and disruptions. In this case, the collecting of a single story reiterated in many popular sources and their re-presentation within a single volume, serves to re-frame and to track the patterns and changes of distribution across time. The text includes discussions between Williams and Schäfer which perform dialogic and speculative commentaries on the collected texts exploring them within both an art and cultural sociological context. Artist and translator Kate Briggs, provides a poetic speculative end-text that considers temporal and affective elements of the story. Finally, there is an image essay of material associated with the story, its location, and a brief survey of representations of skulls from popular culture, the result of quotidian chance encounters by the author mirroring the methods and context of his art works and installations.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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