COSMIC COINCIDENCE : THE DELICATE TWINNED INTERPLAY OF SITE, STRATA, SPACE AND SOLS
2020
Glenelg (Earth) / Glenelg (Mars), digital photograph, 2020
From an iron age broch to an iron rich red planet, text work, 2020
Mapping the terrain, photographs, original image © NASA with additions by McLeish, 2020
Deep Time, panorama photographs, original image © NASA with additions by McLeish, 2020
Sol 123, text work, 2020
Oxidize, cyanotype made at the site of Dùn Troddan, 2020
Jake McLeish at Dùn Troddan looking down the glen towards Dùn Telve, photograph of clay sculpture, 2020
Billion Pixel View, text and photographs, original image © NASA with additions by McLeish, 2020
Road and rover route, cyanotype made at the site of Dùn Troddan, 2020
Elementals, cyanotype made at the site of Dùn Troddan, 2020
Jake McLeish at Dùn Troddan, photograph of clay sculpture, 2020
Jake McLeish at Dùn Troddan, photograph of clay sculpture, 2020
Jake McLeish at Dùn Troddan, photograph of clay sculpture, 2020
Jake McLeish at Dùn Telve, photograph of clay sculpture, 2020
Bradbury Landing to Glenelg Area / Dùn Telve to Dùn Troddan, text work and digital drawing, 2020
Looking down the glen towards Dùn Telve, digital photograph, 2020
Inspired by the expanding fields of counter mapping and space archaeology, the village of Glenelg in the Scottish Highlands was explored in relation to its twinned site of the same name on Mars.
Dùn Telve and Dùn Troddan are two Iron Age brochs 500 metres apart in the village of Glenelg, Scottish Highlands. The counter mapping project involved the blurring of boundaries between fact and science, and imagination and futurism. The project maps the twinned sites through drawing, text works, sculpture, photography and film.
The project echoes the intention of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program to explore “how Mars compares to and contrasts with Earth,” (NASA 2020) as well as the cosmic coincidences that arise. The Glenelg area on Mars was chosen out of geological interest as it “marks the intersection of three kinds of terrain” and named ‘Glenelg’ by the science team as the Curiosity rover would have to “visit the area twice – both coming and going - and the word Glenelg is a palindrome,” (NASA 2012). Nasa’s robotic space rover Curiosity began exploring Mars in 2012 and came across a rock (now named Jake Matijevic) on its way to Glenelg (Mars); it has been identified as ‘Mugearite’. The type locality, or where the rock was first discovered on Earth, was at Mugeary, Isle of Skye (Earth) approximately 25 miles west of Glenelg (Earth), (Amos 2012). Furthermore, the distance between Curiosity’s landing site and the site of Glenelg (Mars) is of a similar distance of that between the two brochs on Earth.
Archaeology is no longer just concerned with the past, contemporary archaeological discourse suggests that archaeology is actually “a form of futurology, in that it imagines a future in which this past has significance,” (Graves-Brown, Harrison and Piccini 2013 : 11).
The series of work was created as part of my final project for the Art and Archaeology module as part of my MA. Visual and audio material from NASA was also used in the project for educational purposes and links to original NASA material is provided. Please get in touch if you wish to see the short film made as part of the project.
All work made for educational purposes.
References:
Amos, J. (2012) ‘Cosmic coincidence of the road to Glenelg’. BBC NEWS.
Graves-Brown, P., Harrison R. and Piccini, A. (2013) ‘Introduction’. In The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of the contemporary world. ed. by Graves-Brown, P., Harrison R. and Piccini, A., 1-23
NASA (2020) ‘Mars Exploration Programme’.