Exposition

Adorned Afterlife Network (last edited: 2021)

Stephen Edward Bottomley
open exposition

About this exposition

The Adorned Afterlife network was established by Bottomley in 2015 with a University of Edinburgh’s Challenge Investment Award. Bottomley brought together a network of international researchers from Design, Archaeology, Forensic Anthropology, History and Museology to examine hidden objects of adornment and share discourse and analysis through high-quality speculative multidisciplinary research. Museums contain many intangible artefacts from our past that relate to the body as adornment. These objects may be represented in paintings and carvings, or literally buried in sarcophaguses or beneath layers of funereal wrappings. The interdisciplinary nature of the network enabled the examination of these items through each others specialist expert lens, leading to the insight that although we saw the same item, we used different terms and language to describe it’s attributed use and meaning. Collectively we speculated on their purpose (why were they made), significance (both then and now) and how they were made (and by whom). The methodology followed practice-based research, comparing craft makers primary knowledge with curators secondary and tertiary sources via filmed interviews and presentations through each other’s lens of enquiry, to “learn by active experience and reflection on that experience” ( Gray & Malins, 2004). The network’s 2016 symposium co-ordinated by the researcher explored existing precedents and new technologies for the non-invasive examining of artefacts and paintings in museums by computerised tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning. A focus was the funereal adornments, carefully sited personal objects, placed beneath the wrapped and sealed bandages of Rhind Mummy at the Granton archives, the National Museum of Scotland. The findings of the research were further presented in the paper ‘The Quick and the Dead: the Changing Meaning and Significance of Jewellery Beyond the Grave’ (Bottomley) at the Canadian Craft Biennale (2017) and published as a ‘Visual-Textual Paper’in the Journal for Jewellery Research (2018).
typeresearch exposition
keywordsjewellery, adornment, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinary, museum, archive, Craft
date31/03/2020
last modified27/02/2021
statusin progress
share statuspublic
affiliationUniversity of Edinburgh + Birmingham City University
copyrightartist
licensePublic domain
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1026088/1026089
external linkhttp://www.adornedafterlife.eca.ed.ac.uk


Simple Media

id name copyright license
1026246 JOJR-vol-1-Bottomley Artists and Journal for Jewellery Research Public domain
1027738 Bottomley The Quick and the Dead Canadian Biennale Talk 2017 with text selected images Stephen Bottomley Public domain
1027752 Canadian Craft Biennial Canadian Craft Biennial All rights reserved
1039566 AA REF S Bottomley Portfolio 2018 BCU artist Public domain
1039568 AA REF S Bottomley Portfolio 2020 BCU v2 artists All rights reserved
1039570 Adorned Afterlife poster lo res Artist All rights reserved
1039572 adorned graphic finaledit copy artist All rights reserved
1039573 adorned graphic final grey lo res artist All rights reserved
1039577 AA REF S Bottomley Portfolio 2020 BCU v2 artistrs All rights reserved
1050866 AA REF S Bottomley Portfolio 2020 BCU v3 artist All rights reserved
1157640 AA REF S Bottomley Portfolio 2020 BCU v4 FINAL Stephen Bottomley All rights reserved

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