Towards a Theory of Holding the Dead: The Ghostly Edges of Rachel Chu's "Fractured Skull"

Event details

Rachel Chu’s artwork ‘Fractured Skull’ depicts a shattered human skull that has been reconstituted via the Far Eastern art of kintsugi, whereby the fault lines of the repaired object, rather than being disguised, are made visible. Normally applied to ceramics, the kintsugi process in ‘Skull’ appeals to the art’s focus on, in the words of Christy Bartlett, “the vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, (…) It may be perceived in the slow inexorable work of time (sabi) or in a moment of sharp demarcation between pristine or whole and shattered.” However, this is no ordinary skull. In this talk I want to think about how Chu’s artwork implies a proliferation of lost edges, and where our simultaneous ‘holding’ of those edges in our perception situates us.

David Hering is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His writing has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Double Negative, 3:AM, The Quietus, and others. He is author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (Bloomsbury, 2016). In 2019 he was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and in 2020 the Northern Book Prize. He is currently working on two novels and a short story collection, as well as a new scholarly book on a theory of haunting in contemporary culture.