Throughout the cave there is, strikingly, little foreground present – no line of landscape or vegetation on which these creatures exist. They have no habitat save the rock and the dark, and as such they seem to float free, unmoored from the world. They exist at once as exquisite anatomical drawings – and as embodiments of a worldview utterly different from our own. These animals live, as Simon McBurney memorably puts it: in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. A present in which nature was not only contiguous with them, but continuous. They flowed in and out of a
...more
