Past time is finite, future time is infinite – Kathleen Herbert’s exhibition at Danielle Arnaud explored the connection between a lost landscape and personal identity, place and memory, the natural and the manmade. Her video A History Of The Receding Horizon is a poignant narrative of a land stripped of people, homes, gardens and woodland to allow for the municipal construction of the Kielder reservoir.
Kathleen Herbert – still from A History Of A Receding Horizon
How do we sense time? In her film we are reminded of the journey light must make to reach us from the farthest stars. Kielder Observatory is here, looking out into the cosmos. We are then taken underground into the antiseptic tunnels within the walls of the damn. Scientific endeavour. The demands of an industry that also vanished leaving the flooded valley to reinvent itself as a leisure resort. The heart ripped out and replaced with a mechanical version.
Kathleen Herbert – Past Time Is Finite, Future Time Is Infinite
Kathleen Herbert Time Creates Great Distances in Life
Katie Paterson looked at tracing the history of life on earth through its fossils.
Katy Paterson Fossil Necklace
Light gives life. Rocks hold a record of life and its absence impacted by times of darkness.
Katy Paterson – Fossil Necklace
Carving beads from different strata the necklace she threads is a manifestation of deep time and ancient secrets, each bead a tiny world echoing untold planets of the universe and their unique geologies.
Katy Paterson – Fossil Necklace
Beneath the ground – Silent Movies was an exhibition of purely monochromatic work at Q Park, an underground car park. The low oppressive ceilings of this vast space added to the strangeness of this nether world emptied of colour.
Cathy Gale and Carol Wyss were exhibiting their installation Casting Couch. These artists have been casting the landscapes of their bodies.
Cathy Gale and Carol Wyss Casting Couch
The death mask seeks to preserve the memory of a face. These little hummocks are casts of elbows. A part of our own body like the face that we need a mirror to view.
Jananne Al-Ani’s paper View from Above: Latent Images in the Landscape expanded on her research into the Aesthetics of Disappearance. Speaking at the symposium Shadow without Object she asks how one can disappear a body? She told us the grimly poetic story of the The Butterfly Hunter. Margaret Cox, a forensic archaeologist reads the geophysical anomalies in the landscape to discover the hidden mass graves of genocide victims. Clouds of blue butterflies gathering in the Kosovo hills uncovered the sites of tragedy. The butterflies were attracted by an unusual and intense blossoming of Mugwurt which signified a change in the nutrient levels of the soil as the buried bodies decomposed and leached into the earth.
The landscape can work as an unexposed photographic plate. A trace, a latent image can be read and transformed into a site of information. Our understanding of conflict is often from an aerial perspective. The view from above is of depopulated space. We look down on abstracted and beautiful landscapes scarred with trenches and shell marks.
Jananne Al-Ani Shadow Sites
From above we can pick out prehistoric dry stone structures, archaeological sites that are invisible at ground level. These are the traces of the people now absent. Jananne Al-Ani is looking at the bare landscape of the desert, where the past is slowly eroded away by the winds, in Sarah Sze’s The Last Garden the past is overgrown with vegetation. We are left to discover the interventions she has inserted amongst the tangle of undergrowth and abandoned architecture.
Sarah Sze The Last Garden
It is a treasure hunt of clues to a world of materiality and entropy where we can see breakdown and decay but are also aware of new growth. The crack in the wall stuffed with images of the canal water about to burst through from the other side, the weight of the gently swaying rock are reminders of fundamental forces at play.
Hours, Years, Aeons; a site specific installation by Patrick Söderlund and Visa Suonpää known as IC-98 takes us into a dark space as though we are stepping off the edge of the world and looking back.
Abendland (I: The Vaults of Dreams; II: The Place That Was Promised) is a two-channel video with animation by Markus Lepsitö and a haunting soundtrack by Max Savikangas. We see the slow death of a desolate gnarled tree set against the alien black skies of a world with no atmosphere. The film runs in a cycle and so the tree is reborn but this may be the part that is a dream.
Vincent J. F. Huang on behalf of small island nations at the mercy of rising sea levels presented Crossing the Tide. A world of only sky and water.
Vincent J. F. Huang Crossing the Tide
Regardless of how far the world has evolved the four primary elements are eternal. In many classical world views four basic elements are believed to constitute the essential components of which everything consists. Usually these classical elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water relate to ancient philosophical concepts which today are generally compared to the contemporary states of matter, with earth relating to the solid state, air to gaseous, fire to plasma and water to liquid. In Buddhist philosophy the four elements are not viewed as substances, but as categories of sensory experience. – Thai artist and printmaker Kamol Tassananchalee on the theories that underpin his work
Kamol Tassananchalee
When did these primal elements first separate out from the turmoil of the big bang? Sarkis gave us a neon rainbow as part of his installation Respiro.
Sarkis Respiro
Reflected back at us through a constellation of finger prints on mirror
Sarkis Respiro
and in the unsteady surface of water. Through his arrangement of objects, images and codes Sarkis wants to take us back in time to the very first rainbow.
The flysheet of The Quantum Universe depicts a rainbow and the inside cover explains how particles of light from the sun (photons) approach a cloud of water droplets in the sky.
Some pass through, while others enter the drops and reflect and refract back. Quantum theory is able to precisely calculate the probability that a photon, will reach your eye along with many others to create a rainbow on your retina – but (and this is the bit that I still don’t really get) – only by allowing each and every particle to explore the entire universe on their journey through the rain. My understanding after tackling the book is that this doesn’t really happen but in order to compute the probability the maths requires that it does. It’s a poetic thought that the photon hitting my eye has explored the entire universe before connecting with me.
Susan Eyre 