Eating and Art in Heritage

Some recent Bronté-related talks in scholar conferences around:

Victorians Institute
Consuming the Victorians
November 2018
Asheville, NC

Panel: What’s Eating Charlotte Brontë?

“I could not eat”: Consuming and Being Consumed in Jane Eyre by Margee Husemann (Carolina Day School)
“Famished Thought”: Nourishing the Mind in Villette by Gretchen Braun (Furman University)
The Face of the Mind: Sight and Brontë’s The Professor by Rochelle Davis (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) 

WriterCon 2019
Writers' Conference - University of Wisconsin, Parkview
May 2019
Senior Seminar Presentations
Vanessa Acuna, Maddie Bellow, Mason Bloom, Bailey Crawford, Destiny Crespo, Naomi Dornfield, Byron Dowse, Amy Frier, Adam Gadzala, Alyssa Goroski, Ken Holm, Marissa Johnson, Kimmy Kittelson, Ashley Pelczynski, Caleb Ramos, Sydney Schoone, Morgan Underhill, Hollace Villarreal, and Josie Ziemann

In conjunction with ENGL 416/469/495, Major British Authors/Women as Writers & Characters/Seminar in Literature, students will address novels written by the Brontë sisters and some "hot topics" that come with the novels. Should Jane Eyre have ended the way it did? What does Heathcliff's race have to do with his experiences? Should Helen have settled for her husband? This discussion panel will be highly interactive--encouraging arguments, opinions, and rage from the audience--as together you explore why the Brontë novels are still relevant today!

Contemporary Art in the Heritage Experience Conference 2019
Newcastle University
Monday 29th July
‘Creation’ Parallel Sessions: Processes of Creation and Engagement

Lynn Setterington
Sew Near - Sew Far

This paper examines the creation of a transitory stitched-based monument commissioned as part of Meeting Point, in which the pseudonymous autographs of the Brontë sisters are writ large in the landscape that inspired much of their literary genius. The fleeting land-based signature artwork, created for the Brontë Parsonage Museum in West Yorkshire, re-presents and reunites the siblings
with the outdoors. Indeed, the signature quilt, a cloth made up of sewn autographs which originated in the Westward migration underpins the methodology in this practice-based enquiry. This sites specific artwork on the moors above Haworth offers a different lens with which to interpret memory, and in bringing together the three famous signatures with that of local people who donated their sewn autographs to the initiative, new and shared narratives emerge. In addition, this soft, tactile, fleeting memorial offers a counter-narrative to the ubiquitous, fixed and hard commemorations, and raises awareness of the poor visibility of women authors of the nineteenth century.
The stance is that of the artist/designer immersed in embroidery-driven ways of working and making known how this female-centred practice encourages empathetic understanding and help break down barriers of them and us, is intertwined in this study. Indeed, the reach of this endeavour which embraces different audiences including hikers, leisure tourists and online viewers highlights the scope of such alternative, haptic strategies. The knowledge and expertise of the embroiderer with her tacit understanding of collaborative working, also enabled groups such as Talk – English, an organisation teaching English to new citizens to participate and share in the project. As a result the lives and work of the Brontë sisters was disseminated to yet another, different audience. For as educational reformer John Dewey, (1934) acknowledges, ‘the experience of making and encountering the object [is] the real work of art’.
Tuesday 30th July
‘Encounters’ Parallel Sessions: Impact and Reception

Dr Amber Pouliot & Serena Partridge
Fake News and Mourning Shoes: The Challenges of Art Installation in the Writer’s House Museum 

Between 2016 and 2017, the Brontë Parsonage Museum presented Charlotte Great and Small, a contemporary arts exhibition exploring ‘the contrast between Charlotte’s constricted life and her huge ambition’. This paper focuses on the polarized reception of Serena Partridge’s contribution, ‘Accessories’. Partridge’s work, which I have termed pseudo-relics – a nightcap embroidered with constellations; a pair of mourning shoes allegedly embroidered with Emily’s hair; gloves embroidered with a map of Charlotte’s travels – were intended to resemble real relics in the Parsonage Museum. Exhibiting them in a display case with mock museum labels, Partridge sought to productively ‘blur the boundaries between fact and fiction’; the objects encouraged visitors to explore counterfactual possibilities and reconceptualize their understanding of Brontëan experience, crystalized by Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Like the neo-Victorian novel, ‘Accessories’ self-reflexively draws attention to the constructedness and contingency of the historical record. But as Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn observe, neo-Victorian fiction may be differently experienced depending on the reader’s knowledge of Victorian literature and its conventions, and my interpretation, as a Victorianist and Brontë specialist, differed significantly from the experiences of visitors who felt ‘duped’ on discovering the accessories were not relics. Visitors’ willingness to believe in the authenticity of Partridge’s (clearly-labelled) art is epitomized by an article reporting as fact that ‘Charlotte Bronte repaired her shoes with her dead sibling’s hair’.This paper considers the particular challenges of historically-inflected art installation in the BPM, especially in the context of the Brontë myth and the age of fake news.