Old Spaces, Ancient Places: Scotland & Ireland
Watercolors and drawings by Joyce McJilton Dwyer
6 Bridges Gallery is pleased to present “Old Spaces, Ancient Places: Scotland & Ireland,” works by Joyce McJilton Dwyer inspired by the landscapes, waterscapes and archaeological sites of Northern Scotland and Ireland. The exhibit is on view from May 21 – June 29, 2019, with a reception on Saturday, June 1 from 7–9 pm.
The exhibit includes watercolor paintings and drawings in pencil and ink of northern Ireland and Scotland that evoke ancient, prehistoric times. The watercolors provide an imagined view of what the land and water might have looked like in Neolithic times around 2000 to 2500 BC, a time when the Egyptian culture was blossoming with pyramid building elsewhere in the world and Stonehenge was not yet built. The ink and colored pencil drawings show artifacts that remain today of buildings in a small settlement, standing stones, and a funerary site of some of the cultures that flourished on and near coastal northern Scotland and Ireland. The humans who lived there farmed, fished, gathered wild bird eggs, created stone and bone artifacts, built houses and workshops in the lasting material of stone, and interacted with near-by settlements. Sometimes a settlement was vacated and later re-inhabited. Much is unknown about these cultures of so long ago, but the beauty of what they left behind caught me up. The remaining part of the village of Skara Brae on Mainland Island in the Orkney Island group is the most complete settlement from the neolithic age in northern Europe.
