An abandoned rock quarry is a ruined, emptied landscape. Although bearing witness to strenuous work, as a subject of representation it cannot summon the sort of national pride invested in fertile agricultural landscapes, industrious windmills and aqueducts; quarried land is an intervention better off forgotten. When depleted, it is typically…[Read more]

How can material culture studies offer new perspectives on the study of late-19th-century art in France? How can the work of contemporary artists animate a collection of historical and locally specific objects? This paper takes up these questions by a close reading of an installation in Saint-Brieuc, along with the collections of two ecomuseums in…[Read more]

This is an essay about the interplay of objects, art and visual culture in several
community museums and historical sites dedicated to local social history in
coastal Brittany. There, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Breton maritime culture invented a range of compensatory ritual objects, sites
and practices to account for…[Read more]

Both remarkable and everyday, women’s ritual maintenance of the memory of the dead was often the subject of paintings, sculpture, photography and popular illustration produced in late 19th and early 20th century Brittany. Breton popular beliefs put the dead and living in close proximity and this was expressed in a range of visual culture that c…[Read more]

Traditional explanations of Symbolist art’s history dwell upon revivalist attempts to plumb myth and folklore in search of animal-human hybrids: predatory sirens, alluring naiads and exotic mermaids, for example. Yet Symbolist painters were resolutely modern—among them French artists Alexandre Séon and Odilon Redon, or Americans Arthur Math…[Read more]

Skull boxes that both memorialized a dead individual and displayed the deceased person’s skull were made in Brittany from the eighteenth century to about 1900. In Breton churchyards, prior to the First World War, the ossuary, or charnel house (located in the churchyard or attached to the church), was the receptacle of bones of the dead taken f…[Read more]

Several images of the French Atlantic shoreline that I discuss in this essay imaginatively engage with the ecology of the edge of the sea, including its human and non human biological communities. Coming from a visual studies perspective, I am interested in articulating an ecological realism of the French Atlantic coast: looking at the…[Read more]