Current - Contemporary - and Celtic?

 About a month ago, I had been invited to participate in a potential exhibit featuring work by a group of artists, primarily members of An Droichead / the Bridge

As it turned out, my submissions were rejected, and in the end the exhibit (set for Goderich in August) was cancelled, due to lack of interest by others it was reported. (*)

This whole thing however, did spark me to undertake the first new artistic project I have done, well, for too many months. (Those following here and on the web site will have noticed I have primarily been writing many quite detailed 'semi-academic' reports related to the last two years work in experimental iron smelting.) 

 

The spark of this current small work rests with Eden Jolly of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Aberdeenshire. Eden had told me about a guerilla art project he had been doing for some years. In rural Scotland, there is a long historical tension between local residents and 'come from away' land owners, the Highland Clearances of the 1700's being a well known excess. These days, the absentee owners of massive estates are more likely to be Japanese industrialists or Russian oligarchs. Despite their attempts to block access to huge tracks of essentially empty (but still beautiful) land, there is an ancient tradition (now enshrined in Law) of 'Right of Passage'. 

Eden's reaction to all this was to make up small cast bronze plaques, each about the size of a small chocolate bar, bearing the inscription 'Get off my land'. As he wanders the hills and dales and comes across those objectionable (sometimes illegal) 'No Trespassing' signs, he will counter by dropping one of his counter statements. One important consideration is that the cast bronze plaques have an effective deposit life that can be measured in at least centuries - if not millennia.

I think anyone reading here will be quite familiar with this artifact:

‘Venus of Willenndorf’

The object known as the 'Venus of Willenndorf' from Austria is Paleolithic, dated to roughly 28,000 - 25,000 BCE. The figure of a woman, with it's massively exaggerated breasts, stomach and buttocks with obvious pubic details, is 11 cm tall and, carved from limestone. This is just the best known of a number of similar small 'goddess' / fertility figures that have been found in Central Europe from the same era. (further description, with images from all sides and 3-D model)

 

I had originally conceived of a small ‘fake artifact’ which would be a male expression of the same kind of fertility figures as the ‘Venus’. 

‘Priapus of Lumsden’  : 2016, work in progress
ceramic, cast metals (final assemblage)
3 x 1 1/2 x 3/4 inches (individual figures)

 

The intentional use of the wrong cultural reference in the naming (another Roman myth) is intentional, as a reflection of Victorian concepts of antiquity and reference to ‘cultural appropriation’. The object would be small enough to be easily carried, dropped unobtrusively, and at least relatively inexpensive to produce. A master pattern was created at my 2017 residency at SSW, with a plaster mould that hopefully could be used to make clay copies that could be fired easily. Again, it was intended some versions would be also cast in bronze, using the green sand method. The intent was then to randomly scatter these over various travels, without concern if they would be found and kept by others, or become part of the 'historic' deposits.

I decided to dust off this whole concept, primarily as a reaction to my work making contemporary objects out of bloomery iron (using ancient methods) being deemed 'Not Celtic'. 

‘Votives’ : 2022
(showing both sides)
cast tin alloy

Life sized

'Votives' is a small object, 5 cm tall by 2.5 cm wide by 0.8 cm thick, cast in 92% tin alloy. One side has a female figure, obviously an interpretation of the Venus of Willenndorf artifact. The other bears a male representation with an exaggerated phallus, rendered in a similar style. The metal used has fairly good suitability in the environment, decades most certainly and potentially into a century or more. 

A double sided mould was carved in matching soapstone blocks, allowing for fairly easy casting of duplicate copies. The metal cost is roughly $2 each, so not so high as to make random dropping of at least a fair number of these objects possible. I want to broadcast a large number of these at random locations. The hope is that many will be found and kept as 'discovered treasures', with some potentially becoming recovered as future 'archaeology'.

As winter recedes, I will be keeping a few of these figures in my pocket as I start some (limited) travel around Grey County at least. I will also take a good number of these with me on the upcoming trip driving across the east side of Canada out to northern Newfoundland (for a Parks Canada project at L'Anse aux Meadows NHSC). If / when my interrupted plans for a return to Scotland, travel to the Sheltlands and rural Ireland are resumed, I will be sure to drop any number over those countrysides. 

(*) There is another long commentary I had gotten about 2/3 completed about what might define 'Contemporary Celtic'. Other more important project work put this on the shelf for now. Look to a future blog post here.