Were it to exist
Other than as a scattered dying hallucination. In an ongoing study into the rural landscape, focusing on the duality of our relationships with nature, its illusions, and existence in what is becoming an ever urban world. Through the study of bucolic artefacts and otherlyness, Alice draws inspiration from the imagery associated with superstitions, myths and stories and their pervasiveness in everyday rural life.
By visualising Britain’s drifting and often conflicted relationship with its own landscape, Alice explores some of the rural’s darker and more hidden histories or superstitions. Delving into the issues surrounding the UK's class systems’ and their impact on the ethics within the natural world, in regards to both land privatisation and ownership or right to wild animals. Through investigating the historic rhythms and rituals of rural Britain as an inhabited and observed realm, the work has become an exploration into the duality of Alice's own relationship with the rural, searching for some way to express this underlying unsettledness of the postcard countryside dream and the contradictory nature of society’s relationship to the rural.
can you hear that?
rumours of skin
of life or death?
just over there
beneath the epidermis veneer
in the quiet damp?
retracted with time
you can see the gaunt decay
of empty skin untouched
forgotten, unseen
nocturnal
brings an intense silence
stunned, in the headlights
rest your legs
remain unseen
just over there
deep in the womb
this pliable mortal contour
with an inky fluorescence
life continues despite knowing of death
our own pale ritual
Were it to exist
In the presence of their remains
Polished smooth by the layers of time
Engraved in a forgotten place
of soil and sediment
Shaped by the transient time exposed
Like soft veiled figures in windows
Projecting faint rays into the fading light
Curtains hang, solid
Disintegrating into a muted void
An obscure fluorescence permeates from the domain
Darkness cannot exist outside of the light
Forecasting the illusion of the ideal
Fossilised
Light acquiesces to the contour of the night
Partial and permanent
The presence of absence
And the absence of presence
A fly on the wall
Pressed to the glass
The truth unveiled
Dissolving into nothingness
Other than as a scattered dying hallucination
