:: 2009 :: 500cm x 130cm :: Single Edition Digital Print on Canvas ::
Since the dawn of the genus Homo some three million years agao, there have often been found ambiguous artefacts - long predating the generally agreed emergence of artistic and symbolic cognition - that may suggest that early hominids had a developing symbolic cognition too. There is much disagreement about these artefacts: their apparent human or symbolic forms may be coincidental (or we moderns are seeing human forms where earlier hominids did not, and could not, perceive them) and any apparent signs of working on them may have been the result of natural or functional processes such as watermarking or scraping marks on bones during butchering. But the question is not so much whether they represent art or not-art, but that they form a kind of gradation of the ability of early hominids to perceive iconicity from a complete inability to do so at the earliest stage grading to the kind of symbolic cognition we enjoy today. The thing about evolution is that behaviours don't always emerge suddenly: sometimes there is a long, ambiguous history of gradated development that udnerlies this apparently sudden change, and this piece, which is a disordered frieze of numerous Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts of ambiguous import, remembers that idea. See also my essay Notes On The Origins Of Art which gives more details.
