I'm reading a book totally unrelated to turning - or thought so - and turned up a real gem. The book is "Stone Voices: The Search For Scotland" by Neal Ascherson. He has this to say about rock art:
[ When archaeologists and anthropologists first became interested in rock art, they treated it as art on rock. In other words, the approached it much as they approached a painting in the Louvre or a fresco in an Italian church. They looked at what was painted or engraved, at the forms composed of pigment or delineated by pecking with stone tools. They also saw the rock, but what of it? The rock was just the equivalent of El Greco's canvas or Leonardo's white plaster wall. What mattered was 'the art' which the canvas or wall supported.Only now do scientists begin to see their mistake. The 'art in a frame' is in fact an eccentric, very recent way of appreciating and marketing visual culture. It embodies the Western habit of chopping things up into separate segments in order to study them more closely. But for most human beings over most of time, the distinction between art and frame has meant little or nothing. Why should the pigment carefully applied to the rock face be inherently more magical or intriguing than the cracks, stains and crevices of the rock itself? It was in Australia, through talking to Aboriginals still involved with the spirituality and usefulness of decorated rock shelters, that it dawned on archaeologists that by separating the art from the rock they were missing the point.
They are a single context. .... ]
So what about our roots? Consider the place of the tree in human culture. We likely lived in them for a time, have used them for tools, shelter, food, fuel, venerated them, and some of us annualy drag one into the living room. Every time you apply chisel to wood, you are pecking on rock.
BTW, I commend Ascherson's book to anyone interested in Scotland. So far I have learned a number of things about my native land that I did not know, seen things I did know in a new way, and even learned something about myself. Overturning the 'frame - canvas' applecart was a real bonus!
LD