Failed Seriousness and a Subject Worth Fighting For: Representing Sir Gawain

Gawain is the subject of many scholarly papers that analyze the figure in relation to issues such as chivalry, masculinity and the development of the Arthurian mythos. That scholarly emphasis has formed a more recent engagement for me with medieval studies and with Gawain’s relevance to a broad audience, informing appropriately a recent publication that deals with visual responses to the poem. However, the figure of Gawain, specifically the Gawain of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, along with the titular monster, had already had a profound and lasting affect on me during a formative period, returning to me, initially, as a subject explored in my art practice. That encounter in childhood was one of confusion and disappointment, a memorable and subsequently influential nonplussed experience. The narrative of the poem had disappointed my then naive desire for heroic cliches but as a result I have come to understand the ambiguity of the poem’s themes, and the ambivalence of its figures and landscapes was the reason for its greater impact. I have represented the knight directly in four paintings, in a sculpture, and his presence as a proxy for the viewer is implicated in two large landscapes, in this paper I will discus those works and the approaches to representation I have used in trying to understand Gawain and his symbolic significance. 
  
Michael Eden is a visual artist, researcher and writer exploring relationships between monstrosity, subjectivity and landscape representation. Eden’s art practice is focused on semi abstract figurative and landscape painting, but also incorporates ceramic sculpture and constructions. Eden employs theories and representations of eeriness and flux as critiques of returning fascistic right-wing ideologies, identified in overt political discourse and implicit in much popular culture. Eden obtained his PhD from Middlesex University where his project ranged across various disciplines: contemporary art criticism and its relationship to histories of modernism, medieval literature, theories of landscape and space, notions of national myth making, and monster studies: bringing these together through the lens of art practice. Key exemplars informing his critique are the influential and progressive medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (circa 1370) and the problematic modernism of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). 

this seminar is free to attend, but booking in advance is required.