Craig Coulthard

This work is framed in a wood tray frame and is unglazed.

Changing Ideas Award
This work explores how meaning, culture and communication persist beyond human presence, and asks what remains when the systems that shape contemporary society fall silent.

Set within Castlerigg stone circle, the painting brings together two distant moments of human making: prehistoric monument and 20th-century industrial design. In the absence of people, these artefacts appear to enter into dialogue. Yet their “speech” is unreadable—composed of fragments drawn from early cave painting and rock art—suggesting a language that is both deeply familiar and fundamentally inaccessible.

The work engages with urgent questions around environmental crisis, technological legacy and cultural continuity. It imagines a post-human landscape shaped by the long-term consequences of human activity, where objects outlast their makers and begin to generate new forms of meaning. In this context, the car, a BMW 2002—once a symbol of mobility, progress and carbon-intensive modern life—sits quietly within a prehistoric site that has already endured millennia of change.

By collapsing these timelines, the painting reflects on the fragility of current systems and the possibility that future “readings” of our world may be partial, distorted or entirely speculative. It draws on the idea, inspired by Russell Hoban’s book Riddley Walker (1980), that language and knowledge are not fixed, but continually broken down and remade.

Ultimately, the work invites viewers to consider how present-day social and environmental choices might be interpreted in the deep future, and whether the traces we leave behind will communicate anything coherent about who we were.