From Art to Archaeology is a new South Bank Centre touring exhibition opening at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne on 24 August.

From Art to Archaeology draws together works by eleven contemporary British artists who have responded to an ancient graphic land art, such as that found in the hill drawings of giants and horses which populate the chalk downlands of Southern England and the mysterious, graven cup-and-ring-mark stones which lie on the moorlands of Northern Britain.

Some artists have been selected who have worked around particular sites at Cerne Abbas, Uffington, Wilmington or in Scotland, while other artists’ interpretation of site is more eclectic. The range of contemporary works in the show spans twenty five years. Those from the 1970s include Richard Long’s Cerne Abbas (1975). Glen Onwin’s Forest/Peat(1976) and Roger Ackling’s And they cast their shadows (1977) made in the Vale of the White Horse, Uffington. Roger Ackling has been commissioned by the South Bank Centre to revisit the Uffington site after 14 years to produce a companion piece to this earlier work. Other commissions include drawings by John Maine of field systems around chosen hill figure sites and photoworks by Thomas Joshua Cooper which evoke the extraordinary sense of place prevalent in cup-and-ring-mark sites in Scotland. Selected works by Kate Whiteford include two of her Symbol Stone drawings (1983) and four silkscreen prints of her Sitelines project (1990). Artists who have worked from the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex include Barry Flanagan who will show Pilgrim on Anvil (1984) and Malcolm Whittaker.

Other works not directly related to particular sites but extending the exhibition’s theme include Nicky Donnelly’s Shillelagh Dreaming-Holt Cow (1989), a painting which draws together a Celtic prehistory and aspects of present-day Irish culture. Jeffrey Andrews’ Grounds Worker (1991) incorporates modern day ‘fossils’ into coloured concrete slabs, and Susan Trangman in Ancestors I,/i> (1991) presents an installation of four large-scale photoworks of ‘faces’ which take on the aspect of landscape.

The exhibition also includes a documentation section on hill figure and cup-and-ring-mark sites, some archaeological artefacts and an audio visual presentation on the history of artists working from both the land and historic sites in Britain. This exhibition has been devised and selected by Helen Luckett, Art Education Officer and Alexandra Noble, Exhibition Organiser at the South Bank Centre. A catalogue will be published to coincide with the exhibition with an essay by Dr Christopher Chippendale, curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Cast

    To form material such as molten metal, liquid plaster or liquid plastic into a three-dimensional shape, by pouring into a mould. Also see Lost-wax casting.

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Curator

    A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.