Journal

Inspiration: Neolithic Art in Argyll

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We went to Argyll for the weekend, to Kilmartin Glen. 

 It is a watery land - on a map it looks like the dags on a sheep - inlets and islands, sea lochs.

It is a land of deep mossy woods and hanging lichen that brushes your face as you walk along the paths. 

Burnished bracken, mirror like sea lochs, big skies.

I was there to see 5000 year old art . . . . 5000 years. . . . 

It is laid out on rocks under that big sky, looking up to the stars and out to the sea.

You can appreciate how - millenia ago, when life depended on trading routes across water - this land with its straight crossing to Ireland was important, populous, prosperous.  Add in a route through the Great Glen, North to Orkney and you have a powerful setting for the greatest site of Neolithic art in the UK.

Within the Kilmartin Glen area there are 800 Neolithic works - from cairns and standing stones to carved rocks and cists - countless others may still remain under trees, landfalls, fields.

I was there to see what is known as Cup and Ring marks - from simple circular indentations to swirling spirals - pecked into the rocks with hammer stones.

Nobody knows the meanings of the marks - they are clearly of some spiritual or social importance, perhaps related to the moon and stars, perhaps gathering spots, perhaps something we haven’t thought of yet.

We do know some things though - that the hammer stones used were quartz rather than a harder more easily found stone.  Hammering with quartz is a performance, the stone itself glows, the peccusive noise is distinctive, chips of bright stone fly into the air, there is a distinctive smell.

Just knowing that means that you can envision it - the gloaming creeping in, the gathering, the noise.  Analysis of the ground around the carvings shows areas compacted where crowds would have stood and watched for long periods.

It takes between thirty minutes and an hour and a half for a skilled person to hammer out a design.  So enough time for people to stand and watch, sparks of quartz flying into dark skies.

I took a small silk and wool vessel that I had made on an India Flint workshop last month. 

It is shibori felt - wool sandwiched between layers of silk, densely quilted and then felted into a hollow ball shape with an opening at the top. The outside was made from old silk drawn threadwork, scabious printed scraps, some old cami knickers.

I turned this ball inside out - a secret design inside - with the plain buddleia dyed silk on the outside.

Then I drew some ring marks - simple circles around impressions, spirals with gutters running through them, rams horns like cinnamon swirls - and then I copied these onto the silk, drawing with a biro, slightly wonky, travelling over the puckers of the fabric.

I am now covering the circles with simple straight satin stitches, half ring marks, half contour lines.  

The vessel itself was made at Lochaline in the Highlands, incorporating kind gifts from the others on the workshop; the threads I am using are all wool/silk embroidery thread dyed with the plants from the dye garden here; the design is inspired by ancestoral art, magic, indecipherable. 

It is a vessel with a sense of place.

I will post the progress as I go . . . . as I slowly go, with my mindful stitching.

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