27 February — 7 May 2013
Mon-Sun 10am-4pm

The Usher Gallery, The Collection, Lincoln

Recent Wysing artists-in-residence Nicolas Deshayes (who took part in The Mirror), Jess-Flood Paddock and Edwin Burdis (who both took part in The Forest) are amongst the artists included in The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old, Contemporary Art and Archaeology from the Stone Age to the Present, an exhibition curated by Tom Morton (Contributing Editor, frieze magazine, Co-Curator of British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet and Ambassador for Wysing) that brings together objects from the County of Lincolnshire’s archaeological holdings.

The exhibition includes works by more than twenty emerging and established contemporary artists. Taking its title from a description of the age of the Earth found in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the show extends across five venues in the city of Lincoln, a site of human habitation since the Paleolithic era. At is centre is a critical awareness of the mutability of the material record, of how objects may be mobilized to speak of multiple histories, both credible and fabulous.

Jess Flood-Paddock shows her new installation Love, Like a Cough, Cannot Be Concealed, which she created whilst on her residency at Wysing.  It reflects on natural disaster as an unintended archaeological ‘tool’, and the suppression of intimately charged material from the Classical era by 18th- and 19th-century scholars.