Art makes use of materials of geological origin: stones, pigments, mortars, metals, etc.; geology, in turn, has been depicted in various ways in art throughout art history; geosciences present their observations and discoveries in a visual form that can be regarded as an artistic expression. The entanglements of art and natural sciences are multiple, bidirectional, and have given rise to hybrid fields of research: Technical Art History, considering the materiality of artworks; archaeometry exploiting the intrinsic information contained in the artistic matter to trace back its origin and fates; Eco-critical art history, which draws on the environmental dimension of works of art – such as historical landscape painting – to critically explore the history of the environment and its changes.
In this session, we aim for a rich and diverse transdisciplinary dialogue of colleagues with multiple backgrounds and thus welcome a broad range of contributions in fields such as:
- Geosciences in artistic representation, e.g. as sources to study environmental changes, as indicators of the evolution of symbolic and scientific perception of geological objects and phenomena, natural hazards, etc.
- Artwork materials and their transformations over time as physical/chemical repositories or archives of environmental history, including air, water and soil pollution (e.g. stone degradation in urban areas)
- Geomaterials (stone, pigments, metals, precious stones) used in works of art (sculptures, metal objects, paintings, jewellery, etc.) and their intrinsic properties as an indicator of provenance or as a criterion of authenticity; the conservation issues specific to these materials.
- Artistic production and networks in geological landscapes with indigenous/local artistic use of geomaterials, artist migration to geo-resource-rich regions, transport of geomaterials to artistic centres, artistic geomaterials as indicators of power and prestige…