Tags
Art Installation, Ceramic Art, Charmacy, cultiv8, cultiv8 Meeting, Fears Foes and Faeries exhibition, Karen Thompson, Phrenology Head, Scarborough Art Gallery
Next Thursday (26 January, 5 – 7pm) will see cultiv8 begin planning the work on making small phrenological heads with ceramic artist Karen Thompson. Karen has been commissioned to create a new phrenological head to feature in the ‘Charmacy’ as part of the ‘Fears, Foes & Faeries’ exhibition. Those eventually created by cultiv8 will be sold in the shop at Scarborough Art Gallery throughout the run of the exhibition.
‘Phrenology [is] a discipline that involved linking bumps on a person’s head to certain aspects of the individual’s personality and character.’ (http://tiny.cc/bbak6)
- A definition of phrenology with chart from Webster’s Academic Dictionary, circa 1895 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology)
The study of phrenology was developed by Franz Joseph Gall during the early 19th century. In his book on the subject of phrenology, Gall suggested that:
- Moral and intellectual faculties were innate.
- The exercise or manifestation of these faculties depended upon their organization.
- The brain controlled all of the propensities, sentiments and faculties.
- The brain was composed of as many organs as there are different faculties, propensities and sentiments.
- The form of the skull represented and reflected the form and development of the brain organs.
‘Through careful observation and extensive experimentation, Gall believed he had established a relationship between aspects of character, called faculties, to precise organs in the brain.’ (http://tiny.cc/86428)
During the Victorian era, the study of phrenology was a serious pursuit with people obtaining readings of their own and others heads in aiding them to make decisions including finding a prospective marriage partner.
Franz Joseph Gall first believed that the brain was made up of 27 individual ‘organs’ that created a person’s personality. As part of the process of obtaining a reading, phrenologists would run their fingertips and palms over the skulls of their patients to feel for enlargements or indentations. The phrenologist would then take measurements of the overall head size using a caliper. With this information, the phrenologist would assess the character and temperament of the patient and address each of the 27 “brain organs”. (http://tiny.cc/86428)
Modern Version of a Phrenology Head
