Object Image

Unknown Man

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 da...
2019
Oil on canvas
199.0 x 275.0cm
PG 3837
Image © Ken Currie
Text © National Galleries of Scotland, 2023

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