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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Place (i): meaning

I’ve been thinking a lot about place while scribbling ideas and sketches for my guest strip for Ivy.

So much of my work as both archaeologist and illustrator has been about place: about new places, about defining places, about bringing lost and forgotten places back to life – whether with the trowel or the pencil. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in some absolutely fantastic places – remote, exotic, beautiful, fascinating places: Çatalhöyük, Mustique, Palau, the Sudan. I’ve also been fortunate enough to make my home in one of the quietest rural corners of Britain: the mountains and valleys of the Welsh Marches – still as beautiful and steeped in history as anywhere I’ve worked overseas. Each one of these places has left an indelible impression on me. From Dinas Bran to Küçükköy, from Cader Berwyn to Dongola, from St. George to St. Garmon, from Olympos to Oswestry – these places are forever etched on memory and experience.

So just as place brings to mind the strange and the wonderful, the mysterious and the ancient, the forgotten and the hidden, it also brings to mind something far more domestic, centred and homely. For me, place is about getting to know somewhere, not just visiting it; it’s about that deep sense of connection and familiarity rather than a set of foreign postcards. Place is about the hearth, family, and security as much as it is about the exotic, distant and alien. Place is about that heart-sense of belonging.

I’ve tried to bring some of that into my short comic – something of what place means to me.

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Ivy

I’ve been invited to contribute a two or four page comic to the lovely collaborative comics zine Ivy, put together by the wonderful Mita Mahato (theseframesarehidingplaces.com) and MK Czerwiec (comicnurse.com). Mita and MK are part of that excellent crowd of people I met two years ago at the Graphic Medicine conference in Chicago – that enthusiastic gang of comics creators and thinkers that included talents like Sarah Leavitt and Ian Williams.

The theme for Ivy 2 is “place“, and so I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things to do with places I’ve been and places I’ve worked in over the years. I’ve got a head full of ideas at the moment, so I’ve been scribbling away in my sketchbook this morning. I love the theme – seems both cosy and remote at the same time. I’ve promised to send Mita and MK sketches and ideas as they emerge for the Ivy blog, so head on over there to check progress.

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