The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space; a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears or their aspirations. Like echo’s cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.
MacFarlane, R. ‘Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination’. Granta Books: London, 2003, p175
The Mountain and the Cave, 2018
Dimensions: variable
In the autumn of 2017, I was awarded a 12-week Art Residency, funded by Quad Gallery, in Derby, to work on newly commissioned work with Lincoln based art collective General Practice; a multi-disciplinary artist collective living and working from Lincoln, UK.
As a collective, our research and outputs responded to the Peak District’s mythology, topography, and geographic histories, through collaborative, expressive and experimental practice. (General Practice: Manifold | QUAD (derbyquad.co.uk)).
The Mountain and the Cave, 2018, evolved as a topographical and psychological response to Thor’s cave in the Manifold Valley. Playing with the hollowness of language and image, contradictory proverbs have been spatially arranged to follow the contours of the peaks and their caverns, to cross-examine adjacent truths.
Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions, 2017
Dimensions: 130cm x 90cm x 110cm
Materials: dressing table mirrors, crystal-cut vases
Accompanying The Mountain and the Cave, 2018, was Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions, 2017.
Inspired by the prehistoric standing stone circles scattered across the Peak Districts Moors, such as; Nine Ladies Stone Circle, at Stanton Moor, where; legend has it, one Sunday, nine ladies and a fiddler came up to the Moor to dance but were all turned into stone for their act of sacrilege, Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions, 2017, interlinked the regions mythologies with my own beliefs and superstitions.
What peaked, was a virtual image that was live streamed within the gallery, which brought together a domestic shrine, within a public sphere, from a dislocated field.