Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Research Curator
When I go on vacation and respond to the new scenery, I can’t help but think of works from FWMoA’s permanent collection. If you travel to the British Isles, you may consider a visit to one of its many Neolithic sites. The Neolithic period (or New Stone Age) dates from around 4000 to 2300 BCE in Britain, according to the Ashmolean Museum. The era is defined by a change in lifestyle from nomadic hunting and gathering to agricultural and animal domestication, which allowed for permanent settlements.
Neolithic people fashioned tools, cooking and storage vessels, and figurines. They constructed funerary sites and most notably the massive stone monuments, sometimes referred to as megaliths and henges. These architectural forms are an engineering feat and continue to inspire the public and artists alike.
In Sheep and Standing Stone, Avebury, England, photographer Barry W. Andersen focused on a singular standing stone. Located in Wiltshire, England, Avebury’s site dates to around 2850-2200 BCE. It includes the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. In Andersen’s photograph, sheep gather and relax around the base of a stone, seeking shelter from the weather. Andersen captured this ordinary moment, which feels whimsical and surreal. Avebury’s stone circle is not fenced as it surrounds and weaves through the village. Sheep grazing and resting are common everywhere, as in Andersen’s photograph.
While Avebury’s stone circle is larger, Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain is more famous. Extraordinary is its early use of post and lintel construction. Posts are the vertical supports; the lintel is the horizontal element that spans the space between the posts. Stonehenge was made from enormous sarsen stones and smaller bluestones, some quarried from up to 20 miles away and shaped.
When Paul Caponigro received his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, he traveled to Dublin, Ireland, a rich source of early Christian architecture. After his first encounter with a prehistoric stone monument, he quickly shifted his focus. Known for landscape and still life photography, Caponigro’s images of stone circles, standing stones, cairns, and dolmens, were a departure and culminated in his book entitled Megaliths in 1986.
Caponigro’s first trip to Stonehenge was in 1967 and he continued to visit through 1977, spending three weeks at a time photographing it. In the 1970s, Stonehenge was gaining attention by archaeologists and the public. Caponigro read archaeological descriptions of the site and was moved by personal accounts. He explained, “I did encounter a few descriptions by some archaeologists at the turn of the century depicting how they were emotionally affected while at the sites. I took heart in these descriptions and left the facts and measuring to begin an adventure with what I called ‘emotional archaeology.’”i
Understanding the seriousness of Caponigro’s approach, Stonehenge’s security granted him access to the site before and after public hours. He wrote, “I learned to be at the sites not merely to take pictures, but to give myself over to the total experience. . . I watched and waited, and quietly worked the camera while trying to penetrate the unseen.”ii
The Stonehenge Portfolio consists of 12 views that present different views and impressions of the formation. The FWMoA owns three photographs from this portfolio. Stonehenge II and Sunrise Stonehenge (independent of the portfolio) catch the site at sunrise. Dramatically lit, the stones are silhouetted as the sun begins to stream through the post and lintel structure. Caponigro conveys the mysterious and timeless quality of the site. There are numerous theories about Stonehenge’s arrangement and purpose, including a strong connection between the sun’s movement and the stones’ placement.
In Stonehenge III, the lighting is even, perhaps from an overcast sky. The overall lighting gives Caponigro the ability to bring out the textures and subtle tonalities from the chiseled, lichen covered surfaces.
In Stonehenge X, Caponigro used a vertical format and limited the composition to smaller groupings, dominated by two, towering post and lintel formations. This change brings out the stones’ monumental presence as the viewer looks upward.
In between workshops overseas, glass artist William Morris took trips with Dale Chihuly and independently to Stonehenge and prehistoric Scotland. He exuded, “So they were fascinating sites. They were the first time I had experienced exploring these really poignant mysteries. They weren’t just artifacts. They were beyond that because of the mystery that they were shrouded in. So that had quite an impact on me.”iii
In the 1980s, Morris created two related bodies of work, the Standing Stones and Stone Vessels, which embodied different responses to these Neolithic sites. The imagery on the vessels read as two dimensional, whereas the Standing Stone series is sculptural. The FWMoA is fortunate to own an example from both series, including Stonehenge Vessel, a recent donation from Dena and Ralph Lowenbach.
For his Standing Stone series, Morris blew hot glass into the hollow interior space of wood molds, the best method he found to create the stonelike, monumental structures. He enlisted the mold making skills of Jon Ormbrek, who calculated the right combination of wood density and moisture level.
Although solid looking, the Standing Stones are narrow. Many of the standing stones in Scotland are spaced out from one another and are relatively slender. The scale for Morris’ work adds to their majestic presence. They are considered large for that era, sometimes reaching three to four feet in height. In the earlier works in the series, the glass sculptures are opaque, more akin to the stone material. Gradually, the glass became translucent, like our untitled piece, with rippling linear patterns, perhaps alluding to geologic layers.
Stonehenge Vessel is sizable, measuring 21” tall. Experimenting with its form, Morris flattened the blown glass, which afforded him a larger area to create his subject that he made from shards of glass. Some of the shards have designs, recalling petroglyphs or rock carvings. The Stonehenge Vessel series presaged his Petroglyph Vessels.
Under different conditions, the personality of the vessel dramatically changes, like the Stonehenge site itself. With even lighting, the dark, abstract shapes on both sides of the vessel morph into megaliths and the familiar post and lintel rock construction of Stonehenge. Flat and stark, the stones sit in a grassy field made up of yellow and green flecks of color. The blues and whites fuse into a pattern reminiscent of cirrostratus clouds. When lit from above with light emanating into the vessel’s body, the nuanced, naturalistic details dissolve; the yellow greens blend and glow from within, giving the work a magical quality.
To see Stonehenge Vessel, visit the Illumination Gallery during your next visit to FWMoA!