Click on an image to view the work and read about each piece.
Modern Palaeolithic is an exhibition of work and installations which draws upon imagery from the Palaeolithic Cave Art of Southern France, Northern Spain and other locales along with the associated mythical and cosmogonical motifs thought to have been understood by the human cultures of the Northern Great Hunt. The work in this project is intended to evoke an ancient sense of the hunter gatherer in the mind of the modern viewer - more accurately, a remembrance - and uses ancient imagery but modern media.
Palaeolithic art, dating from 34,000 to 13,000 years ago and consisting of famous images of bison, bulls and sorcerer-shamans, essentially forms the bedrock from which the majority of later artistic developments have sprung and while much of the purpose of this art is as yet unknown, the fluid animal forms and abstract shapes from a wild, hunter-gatherer culture somehow still speak to the modern urban audience in a way that is not easy to define. Modern Palaeolithic seeks to resonate with an evocative remembrance through a body of work, aiming not so much to stimulate discussion but to bring about a quiet commemoration of what has passed and to make a connection with the earliest human expressions.
 |
 |
The 'Modern Palaeolithic' exhibition at Leeds College of Art in 2009 also included nine large format illustrations which explored Palaeolithic visual language and sought to gain access to the world of the hunter-gatherer from the ancient point of view, rather than responding with a partly-modern eye. From leaping horses rendered in repeating fashion to suggest their movement to the flickering entoptic imageries common to both migraines and the type of sensory deprivation such as might have been practiced in the caves, these drew from both academic and sense-based research...
Click on an image to view the work and read about each piece.
An essay Notes On The Origins Of Art, along with a survey of objects from the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, was also produced in connection with this exhibition. This essay essentially forms a summary of the current archaeological theories on the origins of cultural and symbolic expression among early humans. Contrary to the popular belief that art and culture emerged quite suddenly 30,000 years ago in Europe and the Middle East, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that symbolism first evolved in the Middle Palaeolithic at least 50,000 years previously.
