Shadows

I am interested in shadows because they are the presence of something absent, which is light. I have in my time taken some good pictures of shadows. I can’t find them right now, but they exist digitally backed-up in an archive I’ll never dig through, probably with a filename composed of a string of numbers.

The other thing about shadows is that they represent the present. (I’m talking about time this time, not light.) The reason I’ve got lots of photos of shadows (somewhere) is because I couldn’t capture them any way else. A shadow doesn’t hang about you have to either capture it, or let it go. There’s the third option of appreciating it, but then you try telling someone about a good shadow. It’s a bit like describing cloud formations to someone who wasn’t there – it looked like an elephant or the boot of Italy; its not that interesting or impressive without the morphed cloud.

This reminded me of cognitive evolution and the origins of art. When did humans start producing art? Great question – no definitive answer. Something like 300-100,000 years ago. There was this all-encompassing theory that academics called the Palaeolithic Cognitive Revolution, which occurred at this time; when homo sapiens developed tool-making techniques, started burying their dead, evolved speech and began making art.

One of the questions that jumped out at me was what on earth possesses a being to make a living breathing thing you can see into a two-dimensional image?

It’s true when I see a dog, I love them and would play with them for hours, but I would never have thought to draw one. Why would I? I can’t draw shit and I’d much rather make the most of my time with a dog. However, there are some people in society who have talent and may be able to draw the dog pretty well. Even if you had the talent, what would it really take to make that leap of inspiration: to see the dog then draw the dog… it had to happen for the first time somewhere, but how?

Another thing learnt from my archaeology and anthropology degree was that most things that survive in the archaeological record are the rarest things. Isn’t that ironic? The majority of stuff made or used by humans is lost over time because it’s either rubbish i.e. detritus (like our takeaway containers), or not important enough to keep (like the stuff in our shed.) Also, they’ve got to last! You can try and hold on to your favourite blanket, but that’ll be gone in 300 years because it’s a dirty piece of fabric. So basically, barley anything survives from 300,000 years ago.

Can you imagine? No, because it’s too darn long ago. Could a rock survive that long, maybe, if it wasn’t being bashed against another rock for 1,000 years and turned into sand. It’s kind of stupid thinking about stuff that far back, but people do and Good on ‘em! What great guys and if you want to do some extra reading go for it here and here. (Although I’ve lost the reference to whatever I’m about to say, so you can take it or leave it.)

We have some cave paintings that survive from that far back, but they were painted on the inside of deep cave systems and that’s why they’re still intact. There must have been other art made by probably not-so-good artists drawn on the outer side of rocks and carved into tree trunks. All washed away or decomposed. Like artists today who make sketches to practise, there would have been the Palaeolithic equivalent of sketching going on on organic materials.

Maybe some being saw a shadow on the sand and quickly sketched around it

TA-DA-

Could it be the first ever 2-D representation of something in the world?

Capturing a moment to record it; to possess it; when the figure who’s shadow it was moved away, was that the leap in human cognition which made it possible to create art?