Relic

by Liz Wells, Simon Standing (Editor)

To say that European landscapes are sprinkled with legacies and reminders of past cultures and events is to state the obvious. Histories are marked in the present, through stories told and through marks on the landscape, relics of former activities and events. Layers of history testify to the overlaying of one era on another; motorways run on routes established by the Roman legions; standing stones inter-relate pre-historic cultures and the business modes of contemporary heritage industries. Together the artist/authors testify to the diversity of ways in which 'relic' may be interpreted as a concept, the extent to which histories are embedded in the everyday and may be over-looked or act as imagistic triggers for speculations about space, place, past and present. They also indicate a range of problems tackled by artists seeking the means to express something of a response to remnants from the past and ways in which medium and method, conceptually and intuitively, themselves contribute to articulating particular complexities from the past as marked in the present, and through their re-marking, becoming a past moving into the future.

96 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2009