by Naoise Mac Sweeney
Every object tells a
story. Indeed, behind each artefact lies not just one but a complex web of many
untold tales – about the people who made it in antiquity, about those who used
it over the ages, and finally about those who discovered it in modern times. As
Keats mused in his famous poem, Ode on a
Grecian Urn, sometimes an object can tell “a flowery tale more sweetly”
than either poetry or prose.
In Leicester, we decided
to put this idea at the heart of our latest engagement project, Artefact to Art (click here to visit the project website). The A2A project (as
it is affectionately known) encourages young people to take inspiration from
classical artefacts, using this inspiration to create new and innovative
artworks of their own. Over the last year, we have run workshops in schools and
museums, produced teaching resources, and organised a competition for poetry
and visual art.
The competition proved
to have a wider appeal than we had dared to hope. We received submissions from
four different continents, with the number of entries in some age categories
running into the hundreds. We are delighted to be publishing sixty of these
outstanding pieces in the forthcoming Artefact
to Art book, as well as displaying them in an accompanying exhibition.
Especially exciting have
been the original, and sometimes surprising, ideas that have sprung from
artefacts that we in the classical community might dismiss as overly familiar.
Our artists and poets have used Attic black figure pottery to think about
colour in the natural world; gladiators’ helmets to ponder the nature of fear;
and Roman mosaics to reflect on the recent “me too” campaign against sexual
harassment.
The book launch and
exhibition are part of the programme for the upcoming CA conference, which
Leicester will be hosting for the first time in two decades. We felt that it
was important for the conference to connect with our outreach and engagement
work, and wanted the new project to reflect the nature of the department as a
combined School of Archaeology and Ancient History. The Artefact to Art project, with its emphasis on the material traces
of classical antiquity, emerged out of these two ambitions.
We are grateful to the
Classical Association for their help with setting up and publicising the
project, to Routledge books for their generous donation of prizes, and to the
Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies for their generous support of the
schools’ programme.
Dr Naoise Mac Sweeney is Associate Professor of
Ancient History at the University of Leicester
