Dr Cynthia Thickpenny
Job title:
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Office:
0.54, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Cynthia Thickpenny joined ECA as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in September 2021. Her project, ‘The Transmutation of Patterns and the Role of Women in Insular Art’, focuses on transmutation, a complex form of ornament found in Insular art (early medieval Ireland and Britain, c. AD 600-1100) that occurred when an artist seamlessly transformed one abstract pattern into a different pattern possessing a radically different geometric structure than the first. Cynthia’s research spans a variety of media, from manuscript illumination and carved stone to metalwork and textiles. She is particularly interested in how women textile makers in the Insular world created transmutation when weaving and embroidering abstract patterns, and how their work engaged with and impacted the making of transmutation in other media likely produced by men in this historical period.
Cynthia earned her PhD in Celtic at the University of Glasgow in 2019, funded by a College of Arts PhD Scholarship. Her thesis, ‘Making Key Pattern in Insular Art: AD 600-1100’, explored key pattern (a design of angular spirals) and individual artists’ agency in their use of concepts like symmetry, line, and space to manipulate this pattern’s structure for creative purposes. Her 2019 article in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (‘Abstract Pattern on Stone Fragments from Applecross: The Master Carver of Northern Pictland?’ vol. 148, 147-76) won the Society’s RBK Stevenson Award. In 2020, she edited and published the proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Insular art, Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception (Oxbow), together with colleagues from the Universities of Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh.
Cynthia first came to Scotland from the United States on a Marshall Scholarship, which funded an MLitt in Medieval Scottish Studies and an MRes in History at the University of Glasgow.
Research interests
- Insular art
- Ornament
- Textiles
- Structural analysis of abstract patterns
- Pictish symbol stones
Cynthia’s postdoctoral project focuses on the transmutation of patterns in Insular art (Ireland and Britain, AD 600-1100). Insular metalworkers, manuscript illuminators, textile makers, and stone carvers created transmutation by transmogrifying one geometric pattern, strand by strand, into another pattern with a different underlying structure than the first. Here Cynthia is expanding a new, artist-focused methodology for ornament studies, which requires close physical examination of individual artworks not for the purpose of stylistic analysis, but to identify how makers conceptualized and used symmetry operations, line, shape, and space to manipulate patterns’ internal structures to create transmutation. Cynthia is particularly interested in how transmutation in surviving textiles—predominantly made by women in the Insular period—reveal how women engaged in this artistic milieu as sophisticated geometers alongside male artists. As her project develops, her focus on artists and making will extend to practice-based collaborations with modern makers working in both revived Insular and mainstream styles.
In her PhD, Cynthia examined key pattern, a design of angular spiral shapes that is frequently found in art around the world. Cynthia explored how Insular artists pushed against their own conventions for key pattern’s structure to fulfil individual artistic aims, invent, improvise, and even fix mistakes during the working process. Her award-winning 2019 article for the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland reconstructed the original location of newly discovered stone fragments on a larger early medieval sculpture from Applecross, Scotland, based on the carver’s unusual treatment of key pattern’s physical components. Her research also emphasised this pattern's global importance through a comparative analysis of makers’ highly diverse engagement with key pattern structure in different time periods, parts of the world, and media.
Cynthia also is interested in horsemanship in Pictland (early medieval, north-eastern Scotland), art-historical analysis of Pictish symbol stones, and the relationship between these symbols and early land organization in Scotland. Her second Master’s thesis examined textual records of Frankish kings’ public acts of weeping and early medieval political debates about these controversial performances of emotion.
See the Edinburgh Research Explorer for a list of Cynthia’s publications.