Seeing Offa’s Dyke

This June, I’ll be contributing to the 2024 Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory conference. In addition to talking about the use of comics as a way of visualising and explaining linear earthwork monuments, I’ll also be organising a small exhibition in partnership with a number of other artists. The exhibition – Seeing the Line: Art, creativity and perceptions of Offa’s Dyke – will bring together a selection of local and not-so-local artists who have all drawn inspiration of one form or another from Offa’s Dyke. The idea is to demonstrate the way in which creative engagements with ancient sites and monuments can reveal different ways in which people see and understand those monuments: as social spaces, as focuses for leisure and commemoration, as jumping-off points from which to explore cultural, environmental or historical connections, etc. This is not a new idea, but it is an opportunity to begin to explore how it manifests at Offa’s Dyke.

As usual, the ODC one-day conference is an opportunity for the wide range of those involved in the research, conservation and interpretation of the dyke to come together. It’s a great opportunity, too, for those who live and work around the dyke to not only hear what those specialists have to say – but to also talk about the things that concern them: access, business opportunities, links with education and schools, etc.

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Art, Archaeology and Community

My Gillray-inspired political cartoons about Old Oswestry have been part of an exhibition of art inspired by the iron age hillfort put on by the Artists Hugging the Hillfort group. The exhibition has been at The Willow Gallery in Oswestry, and is now at Blossoms Gallery in Aberystwyth all through June.

As part of the exhibition opening at The Willow, I gave a short talk about the connections between art and archaeology. The response from the audience was really interesting. Most people attending the talk were completely unaware that there were any connections between archaeology and art – but most were also immediately enthusiastic about the possibilities and potentials of those connections.

For archaeologists, connections with art are opportunities to explore relationships between past material culture and the wider social and cultural meanings of ancient landscape, environment and ecology. But for local communities, connections between art and archaeology are opportunities to help express intimate, contemporary relationships between people and place.

This exhibition brought home to me how much the connections between art and archaeology have to offer those who often feel powerless in the battle to preserve and protect their local heritage. Art about archaeology gives members of a community the chance to show the lived importance of their historical, ancient and ecological heritage – to politicians, to developers, to friends and neighbours… even to archaeologists.

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