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Our Dark Companion, 2008 (work in progress).
This was initially a collaborative piece with artist Ruby Wallis made in response to the Irish winter landscape. Working on a joint residency, we brought together our shared fascination with the way that images can explore the unconscious and provoke a psychological and visceral response, what Freud termed an “uncanny” or “unhomely” sensation. The work echoes some of Sylvia Plath’s poetics of winter melancholia:
The austere sun descends above the fen,
an orange Cyclops-eye, scorning to look
longer on this landscape of chagrin:
feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,
brooding as the winter night comes on.
The work in part pays homage to the monograph, Solitude of Ravens, by Japanese photographer, Masahisa Fukase. However, whereas Fukase’s work contains a certain bleakness, this work strongly embraces the notion of cycles and community: the necessity of the dark as part of the whole.
Printed on cotton rag paper, these prints resemble Japanese screen prints.
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