Gillian Robertson (Winchester School of Art, UK)

How can a painting act as a metaphor [1] for archaeology? What happens to the archaeological object when it meets with the two-dimensional surface employed by the painter? What happens to the painting?

Initially drawing on live excavations on sites dating from the prehistoric to the iron ages, the paper explores how the painter enters the field of archaeological experience in order to make work that inspires feelings associated with archaeology. It examines how two potentially divergent disciplines become intertwined in the acts of perception and painting to produce a particular, concrete form of the fusion of self and world developed in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.

Not surprisingly the body is found to play a key role in the representation of excavations, the living bodies of the archaeologists acting as a key link between painter and ground: '…my body and the others are one whole, two sides of one and same phenomenon.' [2]

Dialogues with time, mortality and history come to the fore. Faced with the uncertainty of the exactness of meaning of megalithic stones and abstract inscriptions at a passage grave, the painter recalls the power of classical imagery to confront chaos with representations of the body perfect.

[1} WOLLHEIM,R. Painting as an Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, p.277

[2}MERLEAU-PONTY, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 354