Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
ambient rhetoric
In Gitte and Poul’s garden
Svendborg, Funen, Denmark Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Grasund alle Herrlichkeit des Menschenwie des Grases Blumen.Das Gras ist verdorretund die Blume abgefallen … (Johannes Brahms – Ein deutsches Requiem (1865) Op. 45) Click on image to open gallery -> Poul, Connie, Gitte, Jan, Keith
Sycamore Gap — a rhetoric of remains
Landscape with monument. [Link] [Link] One of the most photographed trees in the UK, standing alongside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, east of Steel Rigg by Milecastle 39, in the northern borders of the Roman Empire. October 2020. In the early hours of September 28, 2023, the tree was cut down by Daniel Graham and Adam…
Cloud study with monument
In the wake, John Constable 1821. [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] Bathing House, Howick Estate, Northumberland UK. Eighteenth-century cottage, remodeled 1813-15.
ripples in deep time
Ripples in the sand of a 330 million year old river delta. Carboniferous deep time. In the distance, the steel boiler of the trawler Tadorne, wrecked in 1913. Howick Burn, Northumberland UK. An archaeological sensibility.
Archaeological Theatre
Visiting the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen [Link]. What an experience of archaeological theatre! [Link] I discovered the work of Danish neo-classical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844) at the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge in 1977, when its collection of plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was still housed in my college…