Ancient art of the Picts, Scots, Irish, Norse, and other early civilisations

Unique handmade rubbings of ancient carved images transferred onto natural cotton using coloured beeswax crayons. Beautiful hand-crafted items as sold in shops and museums throughout Scotland. Now available to buy here.

Just over a thousand years ago the Picts, an early Celtic people, disappeared as a distinctive nation, but they left behind, as a silent witness to their existence, a remarkable series of sculptured stones that is without parallel in Europe. The art of the Picts, Scots, Gaels, Norse, as well as other ancient civilisations, is represented here in images found mainly, but not only, in Scotland:
 

• Rock Art of the Scottish Neolithic period (3000 - 2000 BC) from around Kilmartin, Argyll, featuring cup and ring marks and spirals carved in stone.
• The art of the Picts, who occupied most of Scotland in the early medieval period, leaving behind an exquisite collection of stone-carved abstract and naturalistic designs. The simpler images date mainly from the 7th century AD, while the more complex ones, using Christian imagery, and merging influences from Irish and Northumbrian art to produce the magnificent cross-slabs, date from the 8th and 9th centuries.
• Images from the High crosses from Ireland and the amazing illuminated gospel manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells.
• Viking art ranging from pre-Christian in Gotland, in the Baltic, to 10th and 11th century images from Scotland and the Isle of Man which merge Christian and Pagan

Ancient Images has available a unique collection of over one hundred such images on calico cotton cloth. The designs are hand carved in sandstone by Leslie Reid using the traditional method of mallet and chisel to replicate features from the original ancient stone monuments. The image is then transferred to the fabric from the sculpture using handmade and pigmented bees wax blocks, faithfully tracing the contours and textures of the original design. In this way the textural qualities of the carved sandstone and the delicate calico fabric are combined in a beautiful recreation of the ancient image.