The ANU Classics Museum is viewing the past with new eyes
The ANU Classics Museum is bringing new life to its collection with the help of contemporary artists.
Article by:
Hannah Dixon
ANU Reporter Deputy Editor
When Georgia Pike-Rowney was a student, she was granted permission to handle an ancient Roman dish.
It came from the collection housed by the Classics Museum at The Australian National University (ANU).
Professor Elizabeth Minchin encouraged Pike-Rowney to look closely at splotches on the base of the dish. Placing her fingers on the marks, she realised they aligned closely with her own grip. They were fingermarks – remnants left by the person, most likely enslaved, as they dipped the dish into red slip – a type of glaze.
“It blew my mind,” says Pike-Rowney, who is now the Friends’ Lecturer in Classics and Curator of the ANU Classics Museum. “There I was making physical contact with an object in the same way someone else did almost 2,000 years ago.
“Those are the sorts of moments that you want all your students to have – a special moment where you relate yourself to history in that very tangible way.”
Through new eyes
Classical Studies is not only about tracing fingerprints from thousands of years ago. It is also about gaining your own connection to the ancient past.
In 2022, Pike-Rowney was guiding a staff tour of the museum. Two PhD students, Julian Laffan and Harriet Schwarzrock from the ANU School of Art and Design, were among the group.
The two artists were given the opportunity to handle some ancient objects from the museum’s teaching collection. This sparked the idea that would become ARTefacts. The exhibition, which is currently on display, is a way to view the past – and the museum’s collection – with fresh eyes. It has been co-curated by Pike-Rowney and Laffan.
In the case of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian wooden writing tablet, Pike-Rowney saw the object through a different lens to Laffan.
“I look at it from a museum perspective, it’s classical and archaeological interest, such as the fact that there’s the remains of inscribed text on the wax inside the tablet,” Pike-Rowney says.
Opening night at ARTefacts. Photo: Jamie Kidston/ANU
“Whereas Julian looked at it and immediately saw the crack and the shapes of the natural wood that are expressing themselves as the piece ages. It is, in a sense, returning to its original state as a tree.”
Laffan’s artwork, The Eye of the Tree: Reading with Platanus acerifolia, is a woodblock and print that responds to the wood of the tablet – which likely came from a singular plane tree. The woodblock he used came from a London plane tree once nestled on a Canberra street.
For Pike-Rowney, The Eye of the Tree spurred new research. The Classics Museum is now considering further cellular analysis to better understand what kind of tree the tablet was made from.
What do you value?
From Harriet Schwarzrock’s tactile glasswork inspired by the shapes of an ancient brooch to Robert Nugent’s short film imagining the inner life of a stolen bronze portrait, the artworks in ARTefacts provide moments of connection to the past and showcase the diversity of classical studies.
“Ancient Greece and Rome are not the modern Greece and Italy you think of today – their complex cultures interacted with and influenced North Africa, Western Asia and Europe,” Pike-Rowney says.
“On top of this, there’s a great deal of scholarship about what classical studies has meant in different contexts over time.”
One of the most striking reinterpretations on display is Treasures of the Wolgal Tribe, a series of installations across the museum by Walgalu (Wolgalu, Wolgal) and Wiradjuri artist Aidan Hartshorn.
“In his words, he’s invaded our museum, an invasion we welcome, and he’s created a number of works that respond to how we think about value, and particularly the idea of gold,” Pike-Rowney says.
In his artist’s statement Hartshorn says that he often returns to the question: “‘If First Nations People of Australia utilised gold and other ‘precious’ materials, would we have been seen differently?’”
For Pike-Rowney, this First Nations perspective captures what she sees as the overarching point of the museum – the importance of the often-overlooked everyday object.
“We have simple things like a baby’s feeding cup or some playing dice. We have little spoons. We have little lamps, things that would have been in people’s everyday lives,” she says.
Having been part of ancient everyday life, these objects are valuable for research, teaching and helping people to relate to the more ordinary aspects of the ancient world.
“We want to encourage visitors and students to think about the biography of the object, the biography of the people who handled and came into contact with the object, and seeing ourselves as part of that story,” Pike-Rowney says.
“Because when you view an object, you become part of that object’s story too.”
ARTefacts, supported by Friends of the ANU Classics Museum, will be showing at the Classics Museum until the end March.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to the Classics Museum here.
Top image: Georgia Pike-Rowney at the Classics Museum. Photo: Jamie Kidston/ANU
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