DIANA WOOD CONROY
Artist Statement
In 1996, with great excitement I renewed connections with my training as a classical archaeologist, joining the University of Sydney dig at the ancient theatre at Pafos through the invitation of my early lecturer Richard Green. The Hellenistic-Roman Cypriot past became my living present and began to permeate my artwork and writing. Classical elements converged with Australian themes in my tapestries and paintings. Archaeology, with its intricate and humble devotion to the minutiae of unearthing buildings and objects claimed me again, so that I could bring to life the work of the fresco painters of the Pafos theatre.
Drawing is a way to be located in a place and to describe what at first appears to be indescribable. I had learnt archaeological drawing in the Archaeological Museum in Florence, and as an ‘illustrator’ in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities in the British Museum. Both for my archaeologist self and my artist self, drawing is a tool of thought allowing a larger framework for other meanings to emerge.
In order to measure time and space, archaeological systems are based on the horizontal space of the survey grid and the vertical levels of stratigraphy going down into the earth. Every discovery is positioned within this horizontal and vertical matrix. This grid is a conceptual tool, but also an active fieldwork process through walking and digging. My work in woven tapestry, built up byhand, seems to me another kind of ‘fieldwork’ across the grid of warp and weft. The iterative process of weaving across vertical warps with horizontal wefts is a process that builds a kind of order. Both archaeology and tapestry are about touch and texture, and also slowness, a quiet consideration of the way things are made, a respect for the arduous technologies that underpinned the ancient world.
I took to making rubbings of the surfaces of the theatre with graphite on rice paper—smooth plaster, rough limestone, chiselled marble, pebble floors and inscriptions—in order to look at the varieties of textures. The rubbing of the great inscription of the Antonine Emperors describing the ‘sacred metropolis of Pafos’ revealed the details of each letter and the rippled patterns of the tooling used. My colleague Stephen Ingham converted the rubbings into a rich sound texture, Akou.
Over many seasons I have gradually documented in gouache and watercolour the 500 or so fragments of wall painting with their beautiful colours. Flower motifs in fresco may have derived from textiles originally, so translating plant motifs back into tapestry has a curious logic. Being part of the theatre excavation precipitated me into what Indigenous scholars have called ‘the shock of the ancient,’ imagining another way of being. Watching the theatre emerge from Fabrika hill, I became absorbed in the genius loci of the site, a sense of place that all the team feel. Perhaps the theatre site is a choros in the Platonic sense, a place that is itself a receptacle generating life, then and now.
Biography
Diana Wood Conroy, (BA (Hons) University of Sydney; MA, SCD; Doctor of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong) combines visual cultures, archaeology and tapestry in many publications, including The Fabric of the ancient theatre: Excavation journals from Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean (Nicosia: Moufflon Publishing, 2004 and 2007). In 2016 she was co-editor with Janis Jefferies and Helen Clark on The Handbook of Textile Culture (London: Bloomsbury). As artist in residence to the University of Sydney Paphos Theatre Archaeological Project she studies Roman wall paintings as well as ancient textiles. The Senior Artists Research Forum accompanied her to the excavation from the University of Wollongong in 2010. Her exhibition work explores relationships between classical, Aboriginal and personal worlds in tapestry and drawing, and is held in national and international collections. She is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the Faculty of Law Humanities and Arts, University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. With Dr Craig Barker she curated Travellers from Australia as part of the Pafos European Capital of Culture 2017 program.