Stone Circle Vision

Aaron Watson trained as an archaeologist (he has a PhD from Reading University in the UK) and as a professional illustrator. He is an artist, and he has created some of the most stimulating understandings of the prehistoric past of Britain. Aaron works with photographs. He works with paint. He works with video. He works with sound. He works with artifacts and archaeological landscapes. The results are unusual and unexpected, and they take me to places well beyond the other worlds of the prehistoric past. The work moves outside of our expectations of time or of archaeological conception of site and of the past. In Stone Circle Vision (2006), Watson creates a photo-collage with images of the Neolithic stone circle in Cumbria at Castlerigg. Stone Circle Vision is a creation that works within and beyond archaeology; it offers no explanation, but it alters the way that we see the past, and that we see the residue of the past in the present.

For more information about Aaron and his work check out this:

http://www.aaronwatson.co.uk/

Aaron has written about his work:

Watson, A. 2001. Composing Avebury. World Archaeology 33(2): 296-314.

Watson, A. 2001. The sounds of transformation: acoustics, monuments and ritual in the British Neolithic. In N. Price (ed) The Archaeology of Shamanism, pp. 178-92. London: Routledge.

Watson, A. 2004. Making space for monuments: notes on the representation of experience. In C. Renfrew, C. Gosden and E. DeMarrais (eds) Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art, pp. 79-96. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.

Watson, A. 2006. (Un)intentional sound? Acoustics and Neolithic monuments. In C. Scarre and G. Lawson (eds) Archaeoacoustics, pp. 11-22. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Watson, A. and Keating, D. 2000. The architecture of sound in Neolithic Orkney. In A. Ritchie (ed.) Neolithic Orkney in its European Context, pp. 259-266. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

The text provided above comes from the following article:

Bailey, D.W. 2014. Art // archaeology // art: letting-go beyond. In I. Russell and A. Cochrane (eds) Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms, pp. 231-50. New York: Springer-Kluwer.