Public Lecture, by Amelia Groom: Dense and Broken, on rocks, writing and pareidolia.
6pm, Friday November 10th Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD, Thomas Street, Dublin.

This Autumn IMMA and NCAD will be joined by Dr Amelia Groom for the 2017 Art in the Contemporary World research and teaching residency. Amelia is an Australian writer based in Amsterdam, where she has taught theory and writing on MA programmes at the Sandberg Instituut since 2014. She completed her PhD in Art History & Theory at the University of Sydney, with a focus on ‘disorderly temporalities’ and the possibilities of anachronism for art historical methodologies. In 2013 she edited the Whitechapel Gallery / The MIT Press ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’ anthology on TIME. For the NCAD / IMMA residency, Amelia will be holding a series of seminars on minerality and embodiment. The seminars will draw from the work of a number of living artists, as well as various historical, mythological and geological phenomena – including Sailing Stones, Medusa, The Vocal Memnon and The Makapansgat Pebble – with the aim of working through questions about extraction, deep time, non-human ecologies, inorganic erotics, pearls, petrifications and other rocky relations.

Amelia will be leading the “Petrified” seminar at NCAD as part of the “Situations” seminar run by ACW:

In everyday language, stones will often stand for ‘inhuman’ emotionlessness – as when we speak of her blank stony stare, the stone cold killer, or somebody with a heart of stone. When something is as solid as a rock it does not break or shift; when it is set in stone, it is fixed and unchangeable. Again and again, rocks come in to language as the antithesis of change, outside of time, without process, stone dead. Beginning from the premise that rocks are not actually atemporal, ahistorical or apolitical, this seminar will be structured around various points of encounter and contamination across the biological and geological realms. Focusing on a range of artistic, literary, theoretical and mythological references, participants will explore questions pertaining to non-human ecologies, queer and feminist neo-materialisms, extraction, ‘deep time’, inorganic erotics, pearls, petrifications and other rocky relations.