Stirling opens the year-long, Scotland-wide celebrations of Dig It!
- an initiative aimed at interesting a new generation in archaeology - with a substantial selling exhibition of works by photographer David Paterson. Charting Scotland's major Neolithic monuments, Paterson's striking photographs of this country's impressive array of standing stones cover all points from Orkney's Ring of Brodgar to the Callanish Stones on Lewis, with many smaller monuments in between.
These "memories out of time" are "messages written on the landscape", according to Paterson, a former commercial photographer and long-term collaborator with the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Now largely working in landscape photography, Paterson took these images between 1970 and 2013. "The stones tell us that humans have long been capable of great feats of strength and organisation, and that they have been engaged since the beginning in a search for meaning and spirituality... We feel [the stones'] power and mystery," says the photographer, even if we no longer understand the language which they speak.
Archaeologists, of course, have long been attempting to understand the stones in their landscape, trying to pin down how these atmospheric monuments were used. If no one has the whole answer, there are plenty of suggestions, from places of ritual or religion to important astronomical markers. Paterson's images take the stones far from the alleged 17th-century Lewis view of the Callanish stones as "fir bhreige" - "false men" - but you can see in them, too, alongside the markers of age, some of the wonder that might make them seem to take on a life of their own.
January 18-March 1, 01786 471917, www.smithartgalleryandmuseum.co.uk
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