Unearthing
Gosport Museum & Gallery, 2023
Unearthing was a multimedia installation which holds at its core hundreds of locally discovered archaeological artefacts in a dramatic, sculptural display that tells the story of man’s journey through time to the present day – the Age of Man.
Branson’s inspiration for the work came from research into archaeological finds in Hampshire Cultural Trust’s collections from both the Gosport area and across Hampshire. The artwork is a response to the ‘frozen’ period of the Covid lockdowns and emphasises the continuity of human history and the deep-rooted connections that we share with those who came before us.
Age of Man
This ceramic frieze reflects our recent entry and rapid advancement into the current Anthropocene epoch – the Age of Man. Smoke fired flint artefacts are dipped into cadmium yellow industrial paint, evoking our relationship to the sun in the face of climate change and man’s technological development. The increasing amounts of cadmium yellow in each concentric layer depict the rise in atmospheric temperature.
Geologists have described a key environmental marker, ‘The Golden Spike’, when plutonium isotopes left from the hydrogen bomb tests of the 1950s. This is when the Earth left behind the previous Holocene epoch – a relatively stable period that had lasted for 11,700 years, at the end of the last major Ice Age.
With each circular ring, the yellow starts to drown the fossils, suggesting the ‘Great Acceleration’ caused by a range of activities: the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, plastics and chemical fertilisers, the loss of biodiversity, and radioactive contamination from weapons testing. Reaching back through the lens of geoarchaeology, we can understand our human path through our cultural evolution and the traces of what we have created.