Figures in a Landscape

 

 Continuing on from yesterday's post and thinking about land art and installing these images in landscape, yesterday evening I made an impromptu visit to one of the Carerthun hill forts near Edzell. I clambered up to the top of the White Caterthun with camera gear and the 7kg 'spear-maid' (stone #2) on my back - not an easy climb, but worth it for the view alone!




The site has some personal significance as it was one of the main locations for my 2020 film 'The Wanderer and the Wish-maid' - itself based upon and inspired by the valkyrie figures of Norse mythology, forming a very tangible link from last year's undergrad work to this year's Master's work.

The ready-made cairn was a gift for installing the stone - creating a natural axis point between sky and earth, the perfect embodiment for a character who inhabits that liminal space, whether as one who takes the spirits of the dead to the otherworld, or if the stone specifically represents Gerthild, Womba's protector and companion, then she herself also spends time in the land of the dead following a near-mortal blow, existing for a time in much the same state as Womba does as described here.




Going with the recently-conceived idea of presenting these works as part of a museum display - following some kind of Foucauldian taxonomy (or references thereto) - one of these images may be printed large on card and displayed on the wall, with a museum-style 'information tag' for visitors. There's a lot more to be said about the modes of presentation and the ideas behind them as applied to museum displays, but that's for another blog post.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deconstructing Texts

Image
  The latest addition to the library arrived earlier today. Even a cursory skim through this text reveals it to be like no other 'novel' I've ever encountered - if it can even truly fit that category, and I can see the connections to Borges straight away, as well as to what I'm trying to do with my own adventures in text and meta-textuality. What does a specific text say? What lies beyond the text - both directly alluded to, or indirectly (via the reader's own experiences and knowledge)? As few people in the West know much, if anything, of the Khazars, we are relying upon the author as an athority - although we can always choose to conduct our own research beyond the novel, in the 'real world'. My situation is different, in that I'm creating something pretty much from scratch (with only allusions to ideas, knowledge and events that exist outside these texts) and then presenting it - whether on a full platter, or only piece by piece, still remains to be ...
Read more

Space and Placement: 2

Image
Looking back over some of the modernist poetry we studied in Semester 1's Humanities class, I've continued to apply more radical visual structures to the poetic text, using words and their placement as a means of enforcing certain feelings or concepts for the reader: for example, during an earlier scene where the main character struggles up the rocky path to her home at a pivotal moment, separating each word describing the journey onto a line, spaced out from the previous, and following, words to suggest a tricky series of steps (compounds and phrases such as 'rock-tripped', 'thorn-pricked', 'branch-beaten' enforcing the difficulty of the climb). And, in the climactic battle - the main emotional thrust of which is not the overall victory of the allies, or the defeat of the tyrant king and queen - but the loss of the main character's best friend, the effect of which reaches its pinnacle in the third page below, signifying almost unbearable isolation a...
Read more

Re-Drawing the Past

Image
Having spent the last few months developing a distinctive 'native art form' for my mythical world, in which gods, mythical concepts and heroes are signified (rather than represented - following the Lévi-Strauss model of 'primitive art' whose aim is not imitation of the subject), a random bit of browsing overturned the notion of a unified art style . Schematics of the idol's multiple faces and design elements   The age and distinctive design work on this idol made me realise the importance of establishing an 'elder culture' which existed long before the present time in which the poem's narrative is set, in which the origins of the 'contemporary' forms could perhaps be traced. Having a single homogenous style of representation made me think of those old TV period dramas set in, say, Edwardian days, when all furniture, fashion and design featured is of that exact era - with nothing from the Victorian or Georgian periods still extant. Furniture, fab...
Read more