Carving Mammoth Tusk

I felt really nervous going into this workshop.

1) it was a whole day workshop, what if I couldn’t do it!

2) mammoth tusk is really old (only 40,000 years old!) I really didn’t want to destroy something that old.

 Well when I first went into the room my fears were not helped. There was about 10 of us attending, and many of these people had come with a plan of how they were going to work. I had no idea, apart from what I’d seen previously in the exhibition, and I was pretty sure I was not up to that standard.  My fears were quickly taken away though when our teacher for the day, Wulf Hein, began to teach us about the background to these beautiful archaeological finds. First he passed round pieces he’d made himself, copies of original prehistoric art. They were beautiful, and what really struck me was how the pieces sat in your hand. The curves and the texture, you could imagine having a piece in your pocket, or just holding it, there was something pleasurable about the feel to them. I like to think of them as some kind of prehistoric stress ball, possibly spiritual, something to reassure the owner of the piece. Maybe like a prehistoric rosary. The last piece that was passed round was the copy of the famous lion man. The amount of time was spent carving the piece does suggest that this was valued and special to the carver, although maybe this person was just more patient and artistic than usual!

Wulf Hein is a fantastic teacher, and very patient thankfully too. Throughout the day he walked round the class giving us tips, and making us new flints to work with. We were given a burin flint for the carving, and a sharper flint for cutting and for carving details. I decided that I wanted to recreate the curves in my carving, and chose to go for a relief type carving, like the famous reindeer carving (although nothing as detailed and beautiful!). The flint tools are so sharp you have to wrap leather around the tool to hold it, or you will cut yourself.

Here's a picture of the tools, with the piece of mammoth tuck on the right, the leather at the top, and the burin flint in the centre.

Carving isn't as hard as it looks, you wet the mammoth tusk then scrape down the piece with the burin, the flint comes away in shavings. The tusk does has a strange smell when it's wet though, I thought it had a stale urine smell, ugh! As you can see, it's a pretty messy hobby.

Half way through the piece. As you can see there was a break half way down the piece of tusk, which I decided to encorporate into the final piece. I really love the way in cave art the artist used the shape of the rock to inspire and add to the drawing, so I wanted to mimic this. In this case I used the break as the top shoulder of the horse, hoping that this would give the effect that it was running forwards. I also positioned the lines of the mane to add to this effect. The top of the mammoth tusk still had the outer layer on, I left this attached as it looked like part of the horse's mane.

So here's the finished piece. I'm pretty proud of it, and I really enjoyed doing the class. It was a very peaceful and thought provoking workshop. We all sat quietly throughout the day, lost in our own thoughts and working on our carvings. I would love to do it again, but I'm not sure mammoth tusk is that easy to come by!

I'd also like to recommend Werner Herzog's film 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', in which Wulf Hein stars in. It is a documentary about Chauvet Cave in the South of France. Here's a picture of Werner Herzog and Wulf Hein on location to tempt you!



Ice Age Art at the British Museum

This is a wonderfully Intimate exhibition, I’ve already been round it four times and I expect I’ll go round again, there’s so much to take in. Firstly the shear age of the artefacts, it really blows my mind, and I find it hard to really get my head round the dates. It’s just such a long time ago. To me the art confirmed that these people thousands of years ago were thinking and creating objects the way we do today. These people were as intellectually and as creatively developed as us. People don’t change, just the technology around them. It shows what mankind is capable of creating. That’s why the modern art had been placed next to the prehistoric pieces, but I felt this didn’t really work.  It was an unnecessary extra, and I didn’t pay much attention to it (something which I’d normally get excited about). The ice age pieces really spoke for themselves, and the craftsmanship and beauty was enough for me.

Sadly the famous lion man statuette is a replica in this exhibition, however as they’ve recently found more parts in Stadel Cave in Germany, I feel this is much more exciting. I look forward to one day seeing Lion Man as a whole.

 The exhibition space is the area in the top of the reading room, it’s very small, which is fine as the pieces themselves are small, and would be drowned in a larger area. However it was hard to see some of the pieces at times as there were so many visitors, the main difficulty being to see the detail of the art you have to get very close, blocking others views. I guess this is always going to be a tricky issue for such a popular exhibition, but I always seem to struggle with viewing artefacts at the British Museum exhibitions.

The room where they’ve projected the cave art onto the walls didn’t work for me, it would have been better to make this section bigger, and project on more walls, possibly with a winding effect as you’re walking in, as if you’re squeezing through into a cave. There was an exhibition a few years ago at the Hayward gallery where the artist had built tunnels out of cardboard, and that’s the kind of thing I imagined. Conveying the claustrophobic and narrow spaces, and sense of quietness. 

I’d encourage anyone to go visit this exhibition. As the British Museum website states ‘An exhibition 40,000 years in the making’. Definitely worth the wait.