Andrew Hazewinkel

This body of work further explores two of my abiding interests. 1 - The entangled relationships between the body, the materiality of objects and human memory work. 2 - The changing meaning and value of objects and the forces that affect that change, either through ongoing evolvement / continuity, or radical interruption / discontinuity.

The images focus on details of a selection of the dramatically excoriated 1st c. BCE marble sculptures that form part of the materially diverse and expansive collection of objects retrieved from the site of an ancient shipwreck.

In 50 BCE a cargo ship carrying a consignment of luxury items destined for the fashionable 1st century villas of the early Roman empire sank off the NE coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera. The ship and its cargo lay long forgotten on the seabed until 1900 when a team of sponge divers discovered it by accident.

The collection, held at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece, includes bronze and marble figurative sculpture, gold jewellery, silver vases, glass bowls, bronze-work, terracotta amphora, jugs, plates, bowls, coins, and the famous Antikythera Mechanism, one of the most complex ancient scientific instruments that survives today.

While the marble and bronze sculptures have provided archaeologists with a rich vein of information concerning trajectories of stylistic figuration, this was not my motivation for working with them. What drew my interest to these marble figures was (and remains) the transformative nature of material relationships between the marble and the chemical elements and living organisms of the marine environment that the figures unexpectedly populated for almost 2000 years. It is the visually arresting result of transformative relationship between the marble and the chemical and living environmental ecology of the deep, including stone-eating organisms, that motivated me to make these photographs, which are at times seductive, poetic and violently eroded. As with much of my work, with these works I have aimed to tease out the experiential correspondence between the time-worn, abraded, and broken stone bodies of a remote past and our own soft ephemeral bodies.

All the sculptures represented in these photographs are carved of exceptionally high-quality white Parian marble. The parts of the bodies that were buried in the sea-floor sediments remain as clear and bright as their original condition. Some sections of the bodies remain highly polished, immune to their spectacular transformation, while at other parts they have become dramatically excoriated. In these photographs an emotionally productive discord exists between the original figure’s refined aesthetic and the counterposing elements of environmentally induced rupture.

There is another story embodied in the excoriated figures, one told by the archaeologist Elena Vlachogianni in her essay “Gods and heroes from the depths of the sea.” In it Vlachogianni traces each sculpture’s stylistic antecedents, and in doing so she reveals their ancestral social meanings and values. She then points out that the consignment of the ill-fated ship was created to supply the demands of a new art market, and that the sunken objects were created exclusively as decorative adornments for the luxury 1st c. CE seaside villas of the Italian peninsula. Describing the ship’s cargo in the closing passage of her essay she brings this otherwise hidden story to the surface when she states -

“The load was perhaps the first of its kind in Western civilization. Its contents, some of them disconnected from any sort of religious or votive purpose, are treated as objects of admiration and of an exclusively decorative character. The age in which art was fully subservient to itself had now arrived.”

^{E. Vlachogianni: Gods and heroes from the depths of the sea, in The Antikythera shipwreck, the ship, the treasures, the mechanism. National Archaeological Museum, 2012. 62-72}