Alexandra Coghlan

Harping on the music of our ancestors

From a series of mysterious objects – ‘flower flutes’, inscriptions, ‘little black things like beetles’ wing cases’ – Graeme Lawson conjures the haunting melodies of the past

Flute with incised geometric design and mouthpiece in the form of a human head, c. 1200. [Getty Images] 
issue 13 April 2024

It’s one thing to sit in a comfortable armchair and see the world in a grain of sand. It’s quite another to hear it in a muddy shard of bone, a spool of wire or even an oddly shaped hole in the ground; to go searching for its voice on the sea bed, deep in the ice, beneath deserts, woods and cities.

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