Romanobritish is a new project that is being run in partnership between Woodlands School, Glyn Derw High School, Caer Heritage Project lead artist Paul Evans and Dr David Wyatt from Caer Heritage Project. The aim of the Romanobritish is to co-produce designs for playing surfaces of two table tennis tables that will be permanently sited within Woodlands and Michaelston Community Schools.
These ‘playable artworks’ will act as ‘ping-pong portals to the past’ with eye-catching designs based on artistic motifs from the Romanobritish cultural period that began after the Roman conquest around AD43. The first session, however, focussed on art that preceded this time and amounted to a whistle-stop tour of artistic prehistory.
The Romanobritish project will feature a number of collaborative artworks during the course of the project and our first piece was based on the theme of very ancient hand stencils which feature in the most ancient cave paintings, dating back some 40,000 years. These hand stencils were originally created using blown paint but we decided to use felt tip pens to trace our hands. Everyone in the class room – teachers, class room assistants and young people each traced their own hand onto the paper and decorated in with patterns based on the very earliest rock art and spiral motifs that appeared in the Neolithic.
We then looked at Palaeolithic representations of animals and considered the conditions under which they were made – in the dark, deep in the ground, from memory. We each drew an animal from memory using charcoal – a material that would have been quite familiar to our ancient ancestors – again creating a group artwork, representing our collective identity.
The final creative task for a very busy morning was to make an individual artwork in homage to the Bronze Age . After looking at images of golden masks, we made a simple, mask-like form in plasticine. We then used another soft, shiny metal – aluminium foil – to mould around this.
Dr Dave Wyatt then made a short presentation on Caerau hill fort and its place in Romanobritish culture to the group which prompted lots of lively discussion.
The session was finished off with the young people being offered the chance to handle some recent finds from the dig – some of which had been buried out of sight for over 2,000 years.
We are grateful to the staff and pupils of Woodlands School and Glyn Derw High School for making this a very special day.
CAER Heritage Hidden Hillfort 