ArtsForum - Dr Karen Hall

'Encounter. Fragment. Reuse: Medievalism in Contemporary Australian Visual Art'

Dr Karen Hall is a Lecturer in Theory in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Tasmania. She completed her PhD on science fiction, lost race stories and the evolution of genre practices at the University of Western Australia in the discipline of English and Cultural Studies in 2008. Karen’s interest in the use of visual technologies to reshape and reimagine medievalism has ranged through subjects including Victorian medievalist photography and fan responses to popular culture medievalism.

In ‘Encounter. Fragment. Reuse: Medievalism in Contemporary Australian Visual Art’, Karen examines the ‘afterlives’ of medievalism in an Australian context. She will explore the work of artists who articulate a sense of encounter and exchange with the medieval past, where the layering within the works also embodies their layering of sources and histories. These works form part of a larger pattern in Australian medievalism, in which the intrusive fragments of the medieval are reshaped and reused in the light of contemporary concerns.