The Mountain and The Cave

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 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.