New paintings responding to discoveries made at some of the UK’s key Palaeolithic sites will be displayed at National Museum Cardiff from Tuesday 11th October 2011 to Sunday 29th January 2012. A series of fourteen works by artist Brian Graham will be displayed amongst the Palaeolithic collections at National Museum Cardiff’s Origins gallery alongside some of the Museum’s finds from key sites in Kent.
The works explore the discoveries made at Palaeolithic sites, such as Coygan Cave in Carmarthenshire, Pontnewydd Cave in Denbighshire, Paviland Cave in the Gower, at times in the past. The human occupation of Britain goes back possibly 950,000 years and thousands of stone tools made by early people survive and often are the only evidence for their presence. Occasionally, human teeth and bones, charcoal and a few cut-marked animal bones add to this picture.
Originally from Poole Dorset, artist Brian Graham felt compelled to pay tribute to the vestiges of these Prehistoric people’s achievements. To create these works Brian walked in the footsteps of these ancient peoples, examining every site and this prehistoric pilgrimage took in a host of different locations including chalk and gravel pits, housing estates, business parks, railway stations, car parks, eroding cliff faces, limestone quarries, stalactite-rich caves, green and pleasant fields, granite chasms, waterlogged meadows and even an adventure park.
Brian Graham said:
“Travelling throughout Britain we encounter a varied, somewhat modified and often diverse landscape. In certain places, evidence of activity exhibited by our earliest human occupants has come to light. Our connection, through time and place to these truly distant forebears, provides much of the motivation that underpins my need to make art.”
Elizabeth Walker, Exhibition Curator, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, said:
“It is very exciting to see the juxtaposition of the ancient with these very contemporary works of art at National Museum Cardiff. It also reminds us just how far we as humans have evolved since sites that today include the car park for Ebbsfleet International Station were once the hunting grounds of bands of Neanderthals.”
