"It is also not a question of repainting the skies... it is a question of opening up the earth, dark, hard and lost in space." (Jean-Luc Nancy)

This session seeks to critically engage with the ground in representation (earth, dirt, soil, rocks, stones, cliffs, mountains) and the ground of representation. While related art historical literature has often focused on avant-garde practices such as Earthworks, or has addressed the ground as an articulation of the sublime within the genre of landscape painting, the recent ‘material turn’ in the humanities provides in-roads for addressing the ground within an expanding set of theoretical possibilities and outside of the traditional art historical loci.

Somewhere between matter and form, the ground can be foundational support, marker of territory, and yet also inchoate, anonymous ‘other’. In representation it often seems to display itself as surface, while simultaneously withholding something of itself or other objects from sight or thought. This session invites papers that embrace this difficult silence, whether in depictions of the ground, or in works made from the material substance of the ground, across all historical periods and media, as well as papers that explore how the ground might determine represented space and time.

How does the ground implicate the body and provide it with a ‘place’? Can it challenge the historical notion of time which has, until now, determined how we write our histories of art? Following Nancy’s invitation, we seek papers that take on the difficulty of the ground, and its promise.

Send your application, including a 250-word abstract, to both session conveners by 10 November. Please adhere to the AAH submission and formatting guidelines, which are available online.

Convenors:
Carla Benzan, University College London, carla.benzan.10 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Catherine McCormack, University College London, cath.mccormack [at] gmail.com