Cave Paintings
Inside my head are images and snippets of shows that ferment away, sometimes for years. This week, I decided to take some time to fiddle with some cardboard and play about with a few ideas of these images.
I’m really obsessed with wolves, proto-dogs and pre-history humans at the moment. I look at my own dog’s (goofy) face and wonder at his lineage and how his ancestors and mine came together at some point and stuck together. I have been imagining for a while, bits and pieces of a puppetry show exploring that moment when wolves and humans came together and decided to be companions.
It looks great in my head.
This week I have also been devouring the graphic novelising of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in early humans and love non-fiction in a comic book style format. The book really opened my eyes to what we can only guess about humans and how they lived their lives before civilisation and farming. What was special about them, what they knew about the world, how their brains grew.
My favourite fact is that of all the animal humans have domesticated, dogs were the only ones who became integral to human life before the agricultural revolution. There seems something so special about that relationship.
I’m really fascinated by paintings found on cave walls, the first bits of human art, but I’m so curious about those moments gathered around hearths and camp fires. How really it’s our ability to tell stories that separate us from animals but they are almost always intertwined within them.
There’s a theory that cave paintings, when lit up by a campfire, would look like they are moving, as the simple figures were animated by the flickering of the flames. I understand all too well that urge to give life to inanimate things as a way to tell stories. I feel that urge has echoed its way to me.
So this little idea of a set (made very quickly with cardboard, hot glue and 12 mini battery powered tea-lights) is an exploration of those ideas: the first pieces of human art, the first human interspecies companionship and the stories that could have been told all those thousands of years ago.
It’s also my first ever crankie! It’s a bit clunky but I’m looking forward to making it a bit more refined. I’m happy that the idea works!