NESS OF BRODGAR: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Orkney Museum, Tankerness House, Kirkwall: Mon-Sat, 1030-1700

Looking back at two decades of excavation – and ahead to the project’s next phase, analysing, interpreting and publishing. Timed to mark the final season of excavation, this exhibition, the biggest in the Museum’s history, features hundreds of finds from the Ness never before displayed in public.

On the morning of Saturday 7 September, there is an opportunity to join the director of the excavations, Nick Card, for an off-season Walk Around the Ness. You can hear about the wider landscape around the Ness and the news from this year’s dig, along with some of the particularly interesting finds.

The atmosphere of excavations at the Ness of Brodgar is captured in a composition of drawing, painting and sound, Drawing Archaeology, made by Dr Karen Wallis who has been an Artist in Residence there since 2016. It’s more than a documentary, aiming instead to evoke the physical existence of the dig, with its focus on the archaeologists’ everyday process and their involvement with the Ness, in a flow of voices and images.

MORE EXHIBITIONS:

  • Three exhibitions are woven together in the gallery near the harbour front. Mother of the Sea is linked to the Northlight Gallery exhibition. A Fragile Correspondence brings writers, artists and architects together to look at language and landscape, including Orkney’s seashore and the vanished Orkney Norn language. Earthbound Orkney features techniques of building in earth and stone in the Orcadian Neolithic.

  • A new introductory display created by Callum Potter, former president of the British Astronomical Society. Great Comets which are easily visible to the casual viewer are rare, but there are now thousands known to reside around our solar system. The display depicts comets in history from Halley to Neowise, along with the science behind comets, space missions to comets, and photographs of comets in the 20th and 21st century.

  • Photographic glass plates of stars, with words and music, show night sky discoveries of the 18th-century astronomer Caroline Herschel. In the background you can hear a recording of her own words, interwoven with specially created music. The audiovisual installation was created by the Orkney artist Lynda Laird while working as artist-in-residence for the Royal Astronomical Society through its bicentennial year of 2020.

  • “The shore dweller has companionship with the free world of nature,” wrote the Orkney poet and shell expert Robert Rendall. “There is always life and movement, birds flying about, waves breaking, salt winds blowing, an occasional seal in the bay, seapinks and other flowers giving colour to the foreshore.” The Orkney shore, its beaches and rock pools, and the life around it, forms the theme for this year’s Orkney Camera Club exhibition.

MINERAL MINDS: ORKNEY GEOLOGISTS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Victoria Crowe: Touching the Surface
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