Here are my Whittington Castle sketches from Saturday. I started out drawing the contrast between the areas of surviving external masonry and the restored areas of rubble core between them (bottom sketches). In the afternoon I drew a section of the rooflines over the inhabited portion of the castle (top right sketch).
I like the way you’ve captured the aged decay of the place, but at the same time shown how this has been halted and “frozen” now into sculptural “memory bundles” that can be appreciated now in a different way. Makes me think of creating sculptures with bricks and mortar……one could paint all the bricks black and white first……..
Archaeology, the heritage industry and “preservation culture” are all guilty of imposing utterly artificial fixed points on the past. Any castle, great house or archaeological site you visit is presented to you at one snapshot instant in what may be a thousand or ten thousand years of occupation and use. Sometimes you are presented with multiple, overlying and conflicting snapshots: this room in the 13th century, that tower in the 12th, this courtyard in the 18th and so on.
Of course, this is often a practical necessity – but I sometimes wonder how people without a grounding in archaeology or history make sense of these places.
I’m comfortable with the artificial panorama of a 12th century castle wall with 19th century rooms, 20th century restoration and 21st century repairs all surrounded by 10th century earthworks and an Iron Age settlement – but I’ve spent my entire career working in these kind of surroundings and can sift it all out in my mind quite happily.
But what about other people? One of my big questions for anyone who is exploring the boundary between archaeology and art is not so much “What are we looking at?” but “What do we see?”