3 - Bone, Stone, Wood: Encountering Material Ecologies in Early Medieval Sculpture

Summary

ALL THINGS ARE connected, but not all things are connected equally – this is one of the central tenets of the ecologies in which all things exist, (inter)relate, and communicate. Recognition of this coextant, if unequal, connection between entities is becoming more commonplace when engaging with things and spaces and places – both of the present and of the past. This increased awareness of interrelational connections is certainly true for those working with material culture and objects, but is also seen in a wider socio-cultural context and more broadly in academic discourse. Pioneering work by the likes of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Andrew Patrizio, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton (among others) has sought to highlight the interrelational and fluid network of things that form, inhabit, and shape the environments in which they and we exist and move, seeking to decentralise the human-centric narratives and structures which have traditionally shaped understanding of the world, and of the species and objects that inhabit it. As noted by Andrew Patrizio, ‘natural history is entangled with the images and processes of the visual (social history of art is a natural history of art)’. Such work has radically shifted the possible discussions surrounding things and objects; it reaches for a more complex and nuanced approach to living, knowing, and being in and of this network, instead of a top-down model of production, patron, viewer, or a human/object binary. These approaches acknowledge and promote the importance of a collaborative and fluid spectrum of natural and unnatural, human and non-human that make up a material and embodied being-in-the-world, of which these medieval objects, their makers and viewers are part. Alongside this awareness of an eco-critically inflected approach to these objects and these materials, it is also important to acknowledge their lush materialities, as discussed by Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey in their ‘manifesto’ on ‘Lush Ethics’, where they write: ‘This is a material moment, and we want a material future […] a future of abundant encounters with the material and natural worlds, a future of touching objects that touch us back’.