Back in 1991 I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne (in its old building) called From Art to Archaeology. It featured contemporary artists with work inspired by ancient British land art, like the Long Man of Wilmington and the cup and ring stones of northern Britain and Ireland. As this was years before the internet got going I thought there wouldn’t be anything online about it, but the British Council website has a page describing the touring show. You never know how long these pages will last though (clicking on the British Council’s ‘past programmes’ I get a ‘fatal error’ message). So I thought I’d just make a note of it here for posterity! Although who knows how long Blogger will survive…
The exhibition included work by artists I have featured on this blog before: Thomas Joshua Cooper, who photographed cup and ring sites, Richard Long with Cerne Abbas (1975) and Roger Ackling, whose And they cast their shadows (1977) was made in the Vale of the White Horse. Ackling
was subsequently ‘commissioned by the South Bank Centre to revisit the Uffington
site after 14 years to produce a companion piece to this earlier work.’
The artworks I noted down at the time that particularly interested me were
- Barry Flanagan’s bronze anvil with the outline of a figure on its point: Pilgrim on Anvil (1984). You can see a picture of this sculpture on the late artist’s website.
- Malcolm Whittaker’s Incised Figure (1991) – a broken board circle with a faded Long Man figure on it. Whittaker’s art has often been inspired by geology, fossils and archaeology.
- John Maine’s crayon drawings of strip lynchets (ridges marking boundaries of ancient field systems, where the plough stopped at the edge of a field)
- Kate Whiteford’s Sitelines and Symbol Stones which resembled chalk hill drawings – white paper showing through black oil paint.
Kate Whiteford has continued making art inspired by ancient forms, particularly Pictish art. Ten years after this exhibition she created a land art piece Shadow of a Necklace at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Yves Abrioux’s essay about it explains that ‘in 1887, the third Marquess uncovered the grave of a Bronze Age woman at Mount Stuart. This contained a scattering of beads from a jet necklace, which was reconstructed and removed to Edinburgh where it is still on display at the Museum of Scotland. … Kate Whiteford’s land drawing explicitly returns the exiled Bronze Age artefact to a site close to the cist where it laid undisturbed for several thousand years. Simultaneously, it hands the necklace back to the people of Bute.’
Footnote: I’m joking about posterity, because there was a proper catalogue, which annoyingly I didn’t buy it at the time. It was written by Alexandra Noble, who was later the curator at the Estorick Collection.
