Invoking Absence considers the entanglements of geological timescales and mineral layers, landscapes, waters and the invisible beings of place within a cycle of deep and neoteric time. It refers to contemporary animist narratives which acknowledge and learn from the complex interrelationality of ‘indigenous thinking’ (Yunkaporta) to re-interpret and expand upon ancient and contemporary Western pagan ‘thinking’ (Graham Harvey, Pegi Eyers). Obfuscated by time and linear narratives of colonial-capitalist progress, the entities and agents of place - water, mineral and deity - hold simultaneously past, present and future worldings.
Material objects made with place matter hold its alchemy too. This multi-media exhibition considers the genius loci and the matterings of place as agents, the absent-present beings whose narratives remain in steadfast flux. Artists that have been invited to join this exhibition work include Chantal Powell, whose sculptural tin casts are imprinted from fossilised rocks whose forms parallel embryonic shapes and cosmic spirals. The rock markings are oceanic memories that speak to the primeval waters of creation. Mair Hughes’ mixed media sculptural pieces draw on the potency of sites and the habit of depositing valued objects at features such as pits, caves, fallen trees and the egress points of underground streams.
Fiona Finnegan’s paintings play with a sense of the uncanny, the liminal spaces like the twilight of the day, where a presence is perceived but never quite tangible. The in between realms where the coexistent domains of mythology and imagination mingle.
Shrouded moments of shock and euphoria are captured in Morag Colquhuon’s Parangolés photography series which captures river swimming in Wales as a ritual which reconfigures rhythms and encounters with the modern and the ancient, the human and nonhuman.
Anna Simson’s ceramics are hollowed with a sense or a sound of a forgotten presence. Some are fired leaving a permanent legacy; other pieces are left raw; exposing their vulnerability and transient existence.
A selection of monoprint posters from Monica Sjöö (1938 – 2005) document her involvement and recurring themes of the cosmic mother in numerous ecofeminist, radical spiritual collectives and art exhibitions which have been a source of knowledge in contemporary ecofeminist & goddess thinking.
Patricia Brien’s painting and installations act as magnified aide-memoires referring to traces and ancient mythic entanglements associated with the Stroud Valleys; its modern-era heritage of textile production overlaying ancient spiritual networks which nonetheless have persisted.
The poetry of JLM Morton is a potent spoken and textual pilgrimage with nonhuman persons of the Cotswolds.