The death of Lindow Man by Aoife Patterson
A couple of months ago student Aoife Patterson visited the Manchester Museum to find out more about the circumstances of Lindow Man’s death. She kindly let me post some of her early “work in progress” on the Blog and has just sent me image above in the graphic novel style. Aoife says she thinks the image is getting there but that it may need to have a more traditional illustrative influence. By this she means that it will be more pen and ink style and less computer orientated, because she feels at the moment it looks too mechanical and life less. But she is working on that. She says she understands that the garrotting may not have occurred but she is experimenting to see how the story works.
For me there’s a kind of Ralph Bakshi “Lord of the Rings” quality about the image, you know, the bits where they were running out of time and decided to do overlays of real live actors (not cartoon characters) acting out the scenes. I’m looking forward to seeing the next version and thanks to Aoife for sharing this with the Blog. Comments, as ever, are very welcome.
Student's drawing of Lindow Man's death (courtesy of Aoife)
Aoife kindly sent me some copies of some more reconstruction drawings of Lindow Man’s death from the work done by the students she consulted. She talked to the students about her project to create a sequential illustration visualising the death of Lindow Man in order to establish the level of graphic violence sutiable for a the proposed target audience of teenagers. Aoife was inspired by the graphic novel by Frank Millar ‘300′ which has recently been made into a feature film. Some of the students felt that Lindow Man’s death could be explained with the minimum of violence but it would tend to stick longer in the minds of students if the deaths of ritual sacrifices was shown to be extremely vivid and graphic. She also asked them whether sequential illustration was less likely to be taken seriously because of the medium. One student felt that was possible because people could argue that the violence was being blown out of proportion in order to shock but most teenagers would probably take it seriously.
Thanks again to Aoife and the students for sharing their work on the Lindow man Blog.
Aoife's bird's eye view of a native settlement
Just got out of a meeting with a student called Aoife, who is taking an MA in archaeological illustration at Swindon College. She is working on a cartoon strip sequence which will tell the story of how Lindow Man was killed. Today was a fact-finding trip to find out more about the circumstances of Lindow Man’s death. I showed her slides of dramatic reconstructions of Lindow Man’s death from the Manchester Museum’s 1987 or 1991 audio-visual presentation. It was very hard to answer some of her questions either because we don’t know or because the experts disagree. In that case how does she represent visually Lindow Man’s last hours? The work-in-progress drawings were fascinating and even without text it was very clear to me that this was about Lindow Man. Her depiction of Lindow Man’s death was, well, graphic and shocking: sprays of blood burst out after Lindow Man is hit on the head and the executioner is covered in the stuff.
Lindow Man hit on the head in Aoife's sketch
It reminded me of the killing of a live pig on Jamie Oliver’s programme about pork last week. Somehow it’s the mechanical and routine nature of what is done that is the most shocking. The same kind of rawness can be seen in Lone Hvass’s reconstruction of the death of Borremose III woman that appears in Mike Parker Pearson’s article ‘Lindow Man and the Danish connection’ in Anthropology Today (Feb.1986). The naked woman’s arms are held behind her back, whilst someone else is about to strike her with a thick branch. In the background the mob is baying for her blood and someone appears to be bending down, perhaps to pick up a stone. It is hard enough to read about scapegoating incidents without seeing the moments before death depicted so clearly. Perhaps like poetry, the artistic medium of drawing is the only way to get across what may have happened with the appropriate intensity of feeling. I’m really looing forward to seeing this in finished form. Thanks to Aoife for allowing the Museum to post examples of her work in progress on the Lindow Man blog for others to see.
