CAST RESIDENCY (Helston, Cornwall)
MARCH - NOVEMBER 2022
The studio as the site of a dig. When working in the studio I imagine that there is a place in my peripheral vision that is just out of reach. A place you can’t quite touch. Somewhere unknown yet you can feel that it is there. It is a place you can find your way to in dreams, to wander and explore the strangely familiar landscape. It is a dusty, dry and an empty place, a hole. In this hollow landscape I imagine it is possible to hear voices of the dead. If you pick up a hollow bone and place it to your ear like a shell, perhaps you can hear the soft murmurings of the dead? I recently discovered an ancient well under the roots of an ash tree at the far end of the garden in Lamorna, Cornwall. The entrance is deep and black, a portal reminiscent of an archetypal passage to the underworld, to hell, a hidden place.
The work made during this 9-month residency at CAST is an imagined excavation of this place, as a hole that exists between the dead and the living. Drawn From The Well, a body of work made for Grayswharf Gallery, Penryn consisting of charcoal drawings, porcelain ceramic forms and stitched textile sculpture made in response to this site. It has become a space I think of as a symbolic womb, a vessel, a dark passageway with tangled roots that leads to something unknowable. A place of longing.
Catalogue Text
I recently discovered an ancient well under the roots of an ash tree at the far end of the garden in Lamorna, Cornwall. The entrance is deep and black, a portal reminiscent of an archetypal passage to the underworld, to hell, a hidden place. The well water seeps out and into the garden above.
The circular charcoal drawings reference sonography, ultrasound waves scanning an internal empty space anticipating an echo. Looking into the dark well water and drawing the fleeting forms that emerge also draws on magical practices relating to methods of divination such as scrying, where a medium would look into a vessel containing water in the hope of receiving a vision. The well as a metaphor has become a deep internal space, a site of excavation, and a meditation on the depth of grief.
Drawn From The Well contains visceral sculptural forms such as umbilical cords made from text printed onto fabric from old schoolbooks belonging to Jack Perry (1990-2006). I imagine what might lie in the blackness in the mud at the bottom of the well. Thick root like umbilical cords have become part of the textile forms. The feeling that there is something unspeakable also present in the well like the raw visceral presence of grief gives form to feelings impossible to voice. The textile entrails suggest something that has been vomited, regurgitated, expelled from this space, something undesirable and awkward.
Porcelain fragments lie broken in pools of dust scattered across the floor as though tumbling out of something and down to earth, a fallen magnetic field of debris perhaps? The idea of excavating a hollow place, a space containing a fragile echo of the past is what I draw from the well. A remembering. Working with porcelain I feel connected to emptiness, to transience, to something precious, to white earth and to death. I am connected to the idea of deep time by working with this material and how a ghostly presence is felt through the making process.
Images: work in progress studio shots March - November 2022 CAST, Helston
