This post is the second of a series as 2024 RCWMS Artist-in-Residence MJ Sharp contemplates her photographic archive. Stay tuned for more!!
In 2021/2022 I had the privilege of spending a Fulbright Scholar year collaborating with Dr. Kevin Gaston of the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) in Cornwall in the UK. Some of Dr. Gaston’s research concerns the effects of light pollution on nocturnal ecosystems, and we share a sense of alarm about exponentially increasing light pollution and its deleterious effects. The numbers are stark; for example, eighty-three percent of the world’s population lives under a light-polluted night sky, and eighty percent of people in North America can no longer see the Milky Way. In Singapore the skies are so bright at night that there is nowhere a person can achieve natural night vision. The health effects of such artificial living conditions on humans are now well-documented, and as data comes in about other creatures—birds, bats, moths, and even sea life—the picture gets even bleaker.
Recent excavations at prehistoric ruins in Cornwall have found reflective quartz components. Some were originally part of the megaliths themselves in the form of naturally-occurring seams of quartz that eroded out from the granite over millennia, fell to the ground, and were buried. Archaeologists also discovered pieces of quartz that had been struck together to make flashes of light. Both suggest that people were sometimes visiting these sites in low light or at night. Taking that discovery as my artistic departure point, I spent the better part of a year visiting and photographing a variety of ancient sites of Cornwall at night to bring to modern people a little bit of the magic of these places under those conditions. Back in the U.S. at The Fruit, a cavernous and dark event space in Durham, North Carolina (and co-sponsor of this year’s Artist Residency), I set up large projections of the Cornwall night images as a vehicle to encourage people to remember their own experiences of darkness and night. We can come together to combat light pollution, but the first step is remembering what we’re losing.
Dr. Andy Jones of the Cornwall Archaeological Unit was crucial in helping me understand and appreciate the advanced design of these sites and the implications of finding reflective quartz there. Archaeoastronomer Carolyn Kennett helped me understand the relationship of these places to their surrounding landscape and the night sky above. An example of that relationship is that many stone circles have 19 stones, a number that meant nothing to me, but since at least the 5th century BCE, the “metonic cycle” has been identified—approximately every 19 years, the moon is in the same phase and in the same part of the sky as 19 years prior.
Below are useful links for further exploration of these issues. Also below are pictures of the Merry Maidens and Boscawen-Un, two different stone circle sites with nineteen stones each and both from the late Neolithic period. The last photograph is of Chun Quoit, an early Neolithic site with expansive views of the countryside and the coastline. What one could see from these sites and how different features of the landscape (burial mounds, for example) lined up was quite important. Equally important was from where in the landscape these megalithic sites were visible. At one site in particular (the Hurlers stone circle complex on Bodmin Moor), there is a theory that during a certain time of the year a ceremonial path on the ground mimics the Milky Way in the sky. Because of our endlessly utilitarian and often rapacious land use habits in much of the United States, it can be very difficult to conceive of large interrelated landscape regions possessing mystical meaning that endures over generations.
The Cornwall images will also be traveling to The College of Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, Ohio from September to December, 2024. _______________________________________________
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