Below – some in-situ photos of the Sutton Hoo and Suffolk series at the Limetree Long Melford Gallery (link here for any enquiries about the paintings – Limetree Contact )
This series was painted after exploring the landscape that surrounds the Sutton Hoo burial mounds in Suffolk this year, where treasure and other evidence of 6th century Saxon culture was discovered in the 1930s.
(I explored a bit about the mounds and Saxon spiritual beliefs in previous blogs – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)
I’ve been reading the author Robert MacFarlane’s book Underland recently, in which he explores the world’s ‘underlands’ – catacombs underneath Paris for example, or natural limestone caves. Places where people buried their loved ones thousands of years ago, or painted mysterious human figures in places such as the sea-lashed caves of Kollhellaren (‘translates roughly as ‘hole of hell’) in Norway.
He explores the place these underground spaces have in imagination and in our psyche. Also not just culturally, emotionally and spiritually, but physically too. Among many impressions, I’m struck by the fact that for such a modest and gentle looking human being he clearly has nerves of steel! The descriptions of squeezing his way into narrow funnels deep in the earth are quite claustrophobia-inducing though un-put-downable.
The book was a meaningful accompaniment to my paintings, inspiring me to speculate on the way those Saxon leaders carefully buried their people – with such reverence and care. It tells us much about what mattered to their society back in the 6th century. Their emotions and physical appearance will have been much the same as ours, but as leaders their motivations were very different. They honoured landscape because they saw much of it as sacred – believing that gods or goddesses resided in aspects of nature. They wanted to leave the land intact with little trace of human dwelling – for example they built their houses from materials such as wood and grass that wouldn’t remain after time.
Their religious beliefs came to be seen as wrong – as pagan, barbarian and separate from worship of the one God of Christianity. From our perspective now though, it’s clear that whatever our beliefs, much of our landscape has been irreperably destroyed, which is at odds with the Christian ideal that we tend the flora and fauna of this world. Robert MacFarlane describes disappearing glacial landscapes and the complex ways that vast amounts of spent nuclear waste must be buried. These are issues familar to all of us, but never told as compellingly. As he describes; our age – now called The Anthropocene – will leave a legacy like no other. Contemplating these thoughts inspired me to paint ‘Trace’ – the largest painting of the Sutton Hoo series (below).
In the next month I’ll be travelling to the island of Iona, then Kilmartin Glen on the west coast of Scotland. Water will be the linking theme for an upcoming series. The new series might relate or add to the themes and problems being explored at this year’s Cop26 climate-change conference to be held in Glasgow.
More on that in the next few weeks!
Sutton Hoo Series. Trace. Oil on 27.5 x 27.5 canvas. Rose Strang 2021
Rose Strang Artworks 