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
In 2017, I was awarded a 12-week Art Residency to work on newly commissioned work with Lincoln based art collective General Practice; a multi-disciplinary artist collective living and working from Lincoln, UK. Funded by Quad, in Derby, 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)).
My response seriously played with the hollowness of language and image, by spatially arranging contradictory figures of speech, titled ‘The Mountain and the Cave’, 2018, and by live-streaming a virtual image of a proposed mythological site, titled ‘Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions, 2018‘.
‘The Mountain and the Cave’, 2018, is a topographical and psychological response to Thor’s cave in the Manifold Valley, where contradictory proverbs follow the contours of the mountain and the cave to cross-examine adjacent truths.