Meet the Experts: Embrace the Canon, Interrupt History

Can embracing the established canon interrupt history and maybe even change the future?

Kehinde Wiley’s Ship of Fools is a striking oil painting hanging in the Queen's House. It depicts four people (and a tree) in a small boat on a dark sea. The painting contains multiple references, textual and visual, to the Western Art Historical canon, with its very title being a nod to Hieronymus Bosch.

This talk will explore these historical and visual references, and what it means to use the established canon as a way of ‘interrupting’ history.

About the speaker

Gréine Jordan is currently in the final year of a PhD with the National Maritime Museum and the University of East Anglia.

Combining methods from Visual Culture Studies, Art History and Visual Anthropology, Gréine's research examines images produced by the London Missionary Society. The central aim of this research is to examine the relationships between missionary texts, artefacts and imagery, with a particular emphasis on how this material related to conceptions of Empire, national identity and Britain’s place in the world.