A Sense of Surface: A Conversation with Amalie Smith
Amalie Smith photographed by David Stjernholm
In celebration of International Women’s Day, Rosie Ellison-Balaam talks to Amalie Smith about her novel Marble, exploring its sponge divers, ancient polychromy, and the work of the trailblazing Danish sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen (1863–1945) who plays a central role in the book. Carl-Nielsen was the first woman in the world both to undertake an equestrian statue of a king and the bronze doors for a cathedral. She helped establish the Danish Women’s Art Association and was an advocate for the admission of women to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Smith also tells us about how she uses art-historical research in her writing and about her practice of moving between text and image, conceiving of literature, and life, as a porous network.
Through historical accounts and real letters, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s life and work is retold in Marble. Where did you first come across her, and what attracted you to her?
I first came across her in the Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen. I saw the reconstruction work she did in Athens in 1903-05. At that point I was already interested in the polychromy of ancient sculpture, as I had read about that. It was quite a shock realising that ancient sculptures were coloured in many different colours and not white, as we have come to see it through popular culture. So, this was the initial spark of the book.
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen photographed by Mary Steen, Courtesy of Billedsamlingen.
What attracted me to her was of course her story. She was an independent woman and artist travelling to Athens for long periods of time, even though her husband was not fond of her being away for that long. It led to a huge crisis in their marriage, but she was devoted to the task of very precisely transferring the colour from the archaic structure onto her new reconstructions. When I first saw her reconstructions in the cast collections I was fascinated by them and her story, only later I realised that her work is still referred to today in modern polychromy research.
Where did you find the source material?
Actually, at that point there wasn’t that much on ancient polychromy! There was an art library near to where I was studying, but I found only a few very thin books on the subject. I was really surprised there was so little material. I also went to the Glyptotek library in Copenhagen, and they had a little more. I was shocked that there was so little.
I also came into contact with Jan Østergaard from the Glyptotek, who at that time was part of a group who were researching polychromy globally. I was able to attend one of their annual meeting in Athens, where they all put forward their research on polychromy in ancient sculpture. That was quite amazing, to be able to listen to researchers going into very particular detail, about colours and pigments as well as ideas and speculations about why the colours were removed.
It is such a wonderful field, as it has so many different subjects to it, you have many fields of knowledge working together to be able to recreate this understanding; what colours meant in antiquity and how it was treated later on. I was really attracted to the subject because it was so interdisciplinary, probably because I myself am in-between being a writer and visual artist.
A Color Reconstruction of a Lion, Loutraki, c.550 BC. Public domain.
With so much of her presence in the novel formed from historical documents, to what extent is Anne Marie a character?
She is based on letters and biographical accounts, I did not add anything to her story that is not true, or that is not written down somewhere. In that way she is like a holograph, something from the past. Of course you can never have a true account of the past, but she is drawn from the accounts I have been able to read and from the letters that are preserved. I was able to piece together a version of her for the novel.
In the end of the book the process of making a 3D model of her face is described, and that part is fiction. The protagonist Marble makes this reconstruction of her and in a way I have been making the same reconstruction; piecing her together, trying to make a sculpture out of her from the material that I collected.
Marble follows in Anne-Marie’s footsteps, looking at fragments of colour on Athens’s ancient sculptures, yet as a reader it felt like there were more parallels between them than this location and point of research. How do you feel the two characters work together?
They definitely have a mirror function. They both travel to Athens and they have the same interest in colour, the traces and pigments, looking into the details of these ancient sculptures. They are mirroring each other, but of course they are different, they are 110 years apart, a lot has happened.
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen and Carl Nielsen at the Acropolis Museum in front of Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s copy of the Typhon, postcard 1903. Courtesy of Carl Nielsen Museum/Odense City Museums.
Anne Marie is a forerunner, an example of an early female artist who chose work over love and her relationship, and over the ideas people have of what a real woman should do. Marble is alive in a different time, but she also struggles to find a ‘work-life balance’. She has to leave Copenhagen, she has to leave Daniel, in order to be able to work.
Do you think these comparisons were helped by the format of the novel? How one page continues where the last left off.
I’m glad that you saw that. It was an important part of writing the novel, that I found a way to embed the shifting of chapters in the book format. Before Marble, I had written shorter texts and was concerned with what could be on one page – I wanted to use the page turn in the same way as the cut functions in film. To be able to write longer chapters, I needed to stop thinking that it meant something to go from one page to another, that it could be a system where the text is a continuous flow, but I couldn’t, and so I found this way of keeping it continuous but still having breaks. I don’t know if it makes sense to everyone who reads it, but for me it was important.
I was thinking of the book as a sculpture, a three-dimensional space where you could place different fragments next to each other. Marble has this interlacing of different stories, that we meet again and again, they are braided together or interlaced, it was a way of putting the timelines in parallel. Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen was travelling to Athens 110 years ago, and Marble is travelling today, but they give a parallel feeling when you place them alongside one another.
The Carl-Nielsen famil photographed by J.F. Willumsen in his studio. Public domain.
What drew you to marble as a material?
Actually, I’ve always been a bit repulsed by marble. I wasn’t interested in marble as a material in the first place, the thing that drew me to it was the colour. Before I started looking at marble sculptures they were all a blur to me, it was almost like I couldn’t see it. We have come to think of white marble as this ideal, it is this surface-less shape, like you would see the idea of David, and not the material, it has to be flawless. Marble has been understood as a perfect material to express these everlasting ideals, it has been used as figure to explain the split between body and idea, the physical and metaphysical. This split is obviously a construction. We should think around these kinds of notions.
When you start looking at these old marble sculptures as not white, you see all sorts of information on their surfaces. That is definitely what drew me to marble, I realised marble is not something an ideal, but it is a physical material full of information. It is made of compressed ocean bed, and skeletons from coral reefs. It has had a life of its own at some point, it is not perfect.
This made me interested in marble as a folded surface, an uneven material. I wanted to rewrite the story of marble. Historically marble has as a concept has been loaded with so much information, with ideals about western culture. Our culture being different from every other because we were the first not to paint our marble sculptures, but this is basically not true when you look at how antiquity did paint their marble sculptures. There is much more of a bridge of what came before and after, not this break we like to think of.
Kongens Nytorv, Charlottenborg: Sculptures by Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, 1920. Courtesy of the Royal Library, Denmark.
As an artist, what do you think is offered to you in the meeting between writing and art? Does the mode of writing grant you anything that visual art perhaps does not?
It gives me different things, but I wouldn’t want to only have one. Writing offers me room to speculate, bring together sources, and narratives. It compresses information and it’s often a very dense space where things which are interconnected come together. The visual arts are a physical experiment, working with material, and media, to see what they can do; what you can do within them and what are their limits.
It’s the going back and forth between these two things – I wouldn’t be able to write without the material and visual investigation, and I wouldn’t find this investigation interesting if I didn’t have the writing and the reading. It’s the going back and forth between them.
I think this double approach has also made me more interested in the book as an object than many other writers are. Conceiving the book as a material, a physical object, almost like a sculpture, and making that part of the writing process. What is possible within a book; what it means to turn a page. All of this interests me. For me media specificity is really important.
Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen outside Fuglsang with their daughters, The Commons.
Within Marble there are ideas which feature in your art practice, from the conditions of Greek sponge divers to the touching and play of materials. Did these ideas extend out of your artworks or were they formed in the novel?
If you think of the whole thing as a network, then the books are more dense areas of the network, and they have more links to other parts of the network. They are where things come together, but they wouldn’t be possible without the rest of the network.
The sponge divers came out of the process of researching archaic and antique sculpture’s surfaces, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. There was a special exhibition about the Antikythera Shipwreck when I was there, which I was really lucky to see. It had all these amazing half-eroded sculptures that had been on the seabed for 2,000 years. Of course there were no traces of paint left on them, but on the other hand you could see the material in a whole different way; how marble is a coral structure, because new coral had started to form on the sculptures and the old coral was eroding.
The Antikythera marble sculptures were excavated by sponge divers. It was not the focus of the exhibition, but my research came afterwards. That these sponge divers were inhaling oxygen on the seafloor, and that they were the first to get the divers’ disease. In the following years after Marble, I kept being interested in them and I found this sponge divers dance; a dance of the divers of the Greek island Kalymnos. I later restaged a modern version of this dance.
Section of frieze intended for the pediment of Christian IX’s equestrian statue, clay model, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, 1909. Courtesy of the Carl Nielsen Museum/Odense City Museums
Another interesting thing was that Anne-Marie Carl Nielsen worked on this equestrian statue, and on the base it was meant to have a relief, and the relief depicted a diver among other figures, you can see a picture of it at the end of the book. It was so magical to find this diver. She spent a lot of time shaping this diver for the relief and I thought that it also said something interesting about her, that she also had this interest in divers. It also says something about her time – the diver’s suit was really equivalent to a spacesuit, it was state-of-the-art technology. With that, a whole new world at the bottom of the ocean was unlocked.
Marble brings to life art history and the visual qualities of life. Both written in a way which feels rooted in experience, yet through multiple strands you have created a complex, and at points, abstract set of narratives. How did you find this balance?
I think I experience the world this way; as an interconnected web of complex phenomena. We are all both rooted in a body, a place, a time, and have access to these abstract ideas of history, philosophy and art. All this which has been transferred from generation to generation. In Western culture we tend to think of knowledge as something that can be separated into different categories for many hundreds of years, which has been effective in many ways, but there is also a lot of things that you miss if you are not able to look between the categories. You miss everything that doesn’t fall into a category, that doesn’t have a voice or is not given any attention. Of course the world is not these categories, they are something we invented.
Working with images, materials, and text is a way of trying to put together things that usually belong to different categories. If you have a text and an image, they are not one in the same thing, there will be a space between them where something new can happen which is not text or visual, but something that is exactly in-between. An open structure where you can add more to it. I describe it as a network, but it’s not a finished network, it’s not like this is the complete picture of anything; it’s full of holes and gaps. So you can read in your own way, you can add information, you can combine it in ways I had not thought of. I like this open-ended structure of writing.
Detail from Ribe Cathedral, bronze doors by Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. Door handle in the shape of a girl (1904). CC BY-SA 3.0.
Why was it important for this novel to have various strands and threads? This notion of weaving and fabric that is ever-more important with your latest novel Thread Ripper, which will be published in English by Lolli next year.
This metaphor of weaving is newer to me because I started working with textiles after I wrote Marble, but it’s similar to the way I would talk about the network and braiding text. Weaving of course has some of the same qualities, by being two systems of threads interlaced. In Marble we have Anne-Marie Carl Nielsen and Marble, and in Thread Ripper we have a contemporary weaver and Ada Lovelace, each pair of figures is interwoven in a way.
Etymologically, textile and text both stem from texere, it has the same root. It is important to say that weaving is older than text; we were weaving before writing was invented. When writing was invented, people would think of it like word-weaving. It makes a lot of sense to me to think of a text as a woven structure, it takes strands from many places, yarn is dyed in many places and colours, and can form a pattern or a motif. There can be a rhythm or repetition, something that comes again and again, often in new ways.
With Thread Ripper I designed the book so that on the left side is one strand and on the right side is a different one. So, you read one strand and then the other, you alternate back and forth. The reader is the one who is weaving together these two strands; in a way the book functions just like a loom. We are going to have it in the same way in the English book, because it’s so integrated in the reading of it. Although it does make it look like a strange novel on the page, it makes sense when you read it.