Faces from the Past
By Dan McLerran Sat, Sep 5, 2015 SHARE ON: TwitterFacebook
How an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life.
On any given day, you might see Oscar Nilsson busily engaged on a project in his new workspace in Tumba, just south of Stockholm, Sweden. A green and pleasant suburban extension of Stockholm, Tumba is a community consisting of families and workers connected to the town’s papermill and milk processing industries, though many commute into the city for their livelihoods, much like any other suburban community.
But Nilsson is unlike most other Tumba residents. He is a sculptor, though not of the usual variety. He works in a well-lighted 80-square-meter newly converted art gallery space. Now a studio, its bookshelves are filled with literature on facial reconstruction, anatomy, anthropology, history, art……….and 30 plastic replicas of human skulls. One can see a vacuum machine for castings, a lightboard, airbrush tools, brushes, and other tools of his trade, including a smaller room for castings and mold-making. He spends much of his time at two ergonomic worktables. Oscar Nilsson has a passion for reconstructing the past, or, more specifically, human faces of the past. He can do this because he is not only an artist, but also an archaeologist by education, armed with a knowledge of human anatomy, a familiarity with osteology (the scientific study of bones], and a finely honed set of skills for handling specialized materials to create lifelike, hyper-realistic facial reconstructions of individuals who came and went long before us, before the advent of photography.
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/faces-from-the-past/
