Unknown Man
About this artwork
This portrait depicts the preeminent forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome (born 1961). In her autobiographical work All That Remains: A Life in Death, she gives an account of growing up in the Scottish Highlands, working in a butcher’s shop from the age of 12, and going on to study anatomy at the University of Aberdeen. She has said that forensic anthropology ‘reconstructs the life led’ and the job of a forensic anthropologist is ‘to reunite the identity constructed during a life with what remains of the corporeal form in death.’ This was her mission in 1999 when she made the first of her three tours to Kosovo, working 12 to 16-hour shifts, often seven days a week, in order to identify the human remains of the victims of war crimes committed during the Balkan Wars. She was, she says, ‘indelibly marked by the experience’. Professor Black was Director of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee before taking up the post of Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University. She is currently President of St John’s College, Oxford.
Updated April 2023
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artist:Ken Currie (born 1960) Scottish
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title:Unknown Man
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date created:2019
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materials:Oil on canvas
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measurements:199.00 x 275.00 cm
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object type:
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credit line:Purchased with assistance from the Heinz Fund, Art Fund and Vivienne and Robin Menzies, 2023
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accession number:PG 3837
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gallery:
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subject:
Ken Currie
Ken Currie
Scottish artist Currie studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He used industrial Glasgow as the subject of his early work, with paintings that were linear in style and modelled in block-like forms. In the early 1990s, Currie was much affected by political and humanitarian events in Eastern Europe....