12 September – 13 October 2009

‘STONHENGE RIVERSIDE’

Brian Fay, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Leo Duff, Mark Anstee, Julia Midgley, Simon Mills, Janet Hodgeson.

In 1913 two young archaeologists, Mr. A. S. Cortesi and Mr. P. C. Grove, out walking from Sherborne, found a Paleolithic implement, a rib, in the calcspar and oolite quarry-debris at the north-east of the town. Incisions on the bone, presumably the rib of a mammoth, were discernable as an image strikingly reminiscent of the celebrated horse head incised on similar bone found in Robin Hood Cave, Derbyshire, now in the British Museum. This was only the second find of such an intact example of Paleolithic art in Britain. The archeologist Mr. S.H. Warren reported that, ‘evidence for the dating of the specimen rested largely upon its artistic style.’ Around the time of the second find, known as the Sherborne Bone, evidence had accumulated in Europe, which showed that some kind of halter was placed on the heads of horses in the Magdalenian age, this gave the likely indication wild horses were habitually tamed, although they had probably not been domesticated. This evidence suggested a new interpretation for the set of elongated lines around the mane in front of the image on the second Bone. These lines had originally been thought to represent a rakish forelock. Carbon dating in the mid 1990s proved the astonishing coincidence, the subject of years of scrupulous conjecture, to be a much more recent artifact, probably fabricated by the students who presented it as an archaeological find. So rested the Paleolithic period in Sherborne. Now the imaginative and creative associations of the Neolithic period can be presented in a new collaboration between Oliver Holt Gallery, Art and Archaeology and University of Kingston. For this exhibition the Oliver Holt Gallery will invite new configurations of works emerging from Art and Archaeology’s Stonehenge Riverside residencies of 2008. This was the final period of the extensive new excavations around the Stonehenge site. These excavations uncovered evidence that the site was used for cremations. The most recent cremation, of around 4500 years ago, coincided with the erection of the giant stones at the centre of the Henge. It is now suggested that the monument, we know as, Stonehenge was a part of a march larger site comprising settlements for the dead as well as the living. The artists in this exhibition consider the potential of archaeological method, mapping, revealing and pinpointing as strategic acts that allow access to time determined knowledge. Following Foucault they eschew the truth embodied through evidence in preference to narratives produced by the methodology of the encounter. Working on site at Stonehenge alongside archaeologists the artists pooled imaginative and speculative material while the archaeologist collated and meticulously documented their facts. The Oliver Holt Gallery exhibition will act as a long lens trained on the relaxed progress of light from distant stars, looking at the scores of the past from the critical spatial practices of today. ‘We would argue that these are special purpose structures – highly symbolized houses (though not houses proper), mortuary platforms, or commemorative monuments of some kind, for example.’