… good grief how time flies …
in the past month we have
- walked around the landscape at Star Carr
- gathered bits and pieces from the woodland and fields around Star Carr
- visited the nearest point on the modern coastline to Star Carr (Cayton Bay)
- interviewed Andrew, Nicky, Ben and James in the Yorkshire Museum library
- spent a day with Nicky, various students and James studying the fine art of flint knapping and arrow making
- checked out what bits and pieces might be available to borrow from the “archive”
- obtained clearance from the conservators to bring an unusual object into the exhibition
- assessed the Studio space in the Art Gallery in the light of all the above
- we have a title for the exhibition Mesolithic Interventions
- and … we have now a pretty good idea about how we will bring all this together into an exhibition that we will have to install on the 18th April!!! HOORAY!!!
In the research we have done so far, one of the key concepts that has emerged for me is that of the journey … as the project has developed we four artists have made several journeys:
into the landscape;
into the archive;
into the territory of the “experts” …
I suspect that the concept of the journey would not be alien to the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, although he or she would have expressed the concept in very different terms … however, the process of going to and from the sea, of moving around the landscape to exploit different resources at different times of the year, of meeting other kin-groups and negotiating taking a “husband” or a “wife” … these would all have represented journeys of different magnitudes and importance …
we do not know how they were disposing of the dead at Star Carr. How did they weave memory and ancestry into their lives and into the landscape? What markers, physical and psychological, did they place in the landscape? what mental journeys were they making?
can we, 10000 years later, imagine a Mesolithic psycho-geography?
