Stephen Vaughan's project is primarily concerned
with the layering of time within the landscape. With qualities
of stillness, silence and clarity, his photographs resonate
with connections to archaeology, history, memory
and myth.
Opened Landscape: Lindow, Tollund, Grauballe is a series
of large format colour photographs of three sites: Lindow
Moss in Cheshire, with accompanying sequences made at Bjældskovdal
(Tollund) and Nebelgard
Fen (Grauballe), in Jutland, Denmark.
These sites are linked by the three most significant discoveries
of preserved, Iron Age, sacrificial bog burials, and have
been the undisturbed resting places of preserved human bodies
for two thousand years. The bodies have been almost perfectly
preserved by the unique qualities of the acid bog-water.
As sites of ritual and sacrifice, these 'opened landscapes'
occupy a place between the known and the unknown, between
being and remaining, where the preserved surfaces of accumulated
centuries rest in a state of liminality, awaiting the peat-cutter's
spade and the scrutiny of archaeologist, poet
or picture-maker.
Vaughan's photographs show a vivid representation of the
bogland view taken on a large 8 x 10" format camera,
whilst also emphasising the landscapes' surface in minute
detail. Scrutiny - like that of the archaeologist - creates
the potential for discovery and gives heightened significance
to each fragment of the landscape surface. For the photographer
and viewer, the act of looking is transformed into an act
of investigation - a search for evidence and meaning.
Photographic portraits of the Tollund and Grauballe people,
taken by The National Museum of Denmark's photographer Lennart
Larsen in the 1950s,
will also be shown alongside Vaughan's
work. These photographs show in detail the two thousand year
old preserved human bodies of ritual and human sacrifice.
The bog burial sites have captured the imagination of archaeologists,
artists, filmmakers and poets worldwide, in particular, with
the Irish poet Seamus Heaney whose publication, Opened Ground:
Poems 1966-1996, includes
many of his 'bog poems' such as
Tollund Man and Grauballe Man.
This archaeological exhibition hopes to bring awareness
to the Danish and British bog burial sites through understanding
the mythology, sociology and history found in northern Europe
and through the visual photographic records produced by Vaughan
and Larsen. |
