Homotherium is the upshot of a lengthy, creatively fuelled journey. It began life in the Wells and Mendip Museum in 2018 through a residency undertaken by artist and animator Sean Harris as part of the project Muse: Makers In Museums which was a partnership between the South West Heritage Trust, Somerset Art Works and a series of small museums in Somerset and Devon. 

The Wells residency culminated in the making of a collection of analogue flipbook-boxes for the Balch Room in the museum, which houses an important collection of paleontological specimens found in the Mendip caves. It also yielded important connections to contemporary ‘Cave Hunters’ in the form of twenty first century researchers Professor Danielle Schreve (Royal Holloway University of London) and Dr Angharad Jones (then Royal Holloway University London, now curator of Creswell Crags Museum). And the realisation that this was a depth that had not been fully fathomed, neither historically nor in terms of its direct relevance to our contemporary understanding of climate change.

Further exploration and creative evolution was enabled by a commission from Eye View Festival, Torbay, in 2019 which yielded an immersive installation The Cave Hunters And The Truth Machine. This embraced the globally significant collections of Torquay Museum, thereby rectifying a major omission from the original flipbook-box installation. This related to the pivotal role of cave excavations undertaken around Torbay in establishing what was referred to as ‘The Antiquity of Man’ – an undertaking no less important or significant than Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The installation was presented in All Saints Church, Brixham, not far from Windmill Hill Cave where excavations were undertaken under the auspices of a Committee in 1859.

Considerable depth, richness and nuance – because these stories are rarely as black and white as contemporary culture would like them to be – was added by a commission from Buxton Museum and Art Gallery as part of BM125. Here, the communities of Dove Holes and Peak Dale each animated a Homotherium based on remains found at Victory Quarry, which lies between the two villages.

Homotherium draws all of this material together for the first time, parcelling it up in a handheld device and taking as its symbol a deeply charged specimen (that would also fit comfortably in the hand); a canine of Homotherium latidens excavated at Creswell Crags by Sir William Boyd Dawkins in 1876. The tooth – and its extraordinary story – is an oracle, a vessel of truth, that speaks of Oxford Men and their abuse of power and influence.

The story is then one for all times – but particularly, unfortunately, for ours…