Chapter One: The Path of Least Resistance
2017 | Multidisciplinary Installation, Performance & Participatory Work
Listastofan Arts Collective, Reykjavík, Iceland
Chapter One: The Path of Least Resistance was created during a time as a resident artist at Listastofan Artist Studios in Reykjavík, Iceland. Developed as a multidisciplinary installation, performance and participatory work, the exhibition brought together photography, projection, sculpture, text, sound and audience participation within a single immersive environment.
Working with water as both material and metaphor, the installation explored movement, containment, release and transformation. Drawing on Iceland’s volcanic landscape and coastal environments, the work considered how experience accumulates, shifts and re-emerges over time.
The exhibition marked an important stage in the development of themes that continue throughout the practice: participation, reflection, memory, transformation and the relationship between inner experience and outer landscape.
Many of the works within the exhibition explored the relationship between conscious and unconscious experience through photography, projected image, reflective surfaces, sculptural elements and text.
At the centre of the installation, projected imagery moved across a suspended form, shifting with light and viewpoint. Nearby sculptural works brought together found and natural materials, reflective surfaces and written fragments, allowing image, object and environment to operate in relation to one another.
A looping soundscape connected the different elements of the exhibition, creating an environment shaped by movement, memory, reflection and change.
Water functioned throughout the exhibition as both physical substance and symbolic language. It appeared as liquid, reflection, ice and projected image, becoming a way of considering emotional movement, transition and release.
Volcanic material, stone and other natural elements referenced the Icelandic landscape while also operating symbolically within the installation. Rather than representing landscape directly, these materials became part of a wider inquiry into identity, memory, containment and transformation.
The exhibition approached the outer landscape as a material counterpart to interior experience, allowing environmental forms and psychological states to remain in dialogue.
Bring subconscious now into the fold
Emotions forward which are old
The reasons why we act that way
The past can rule our future day
Audience Participation
At the centre of the exhibition was a participatory sculptural installation resembling a volcanic landscape. Visitors were invited to anonymously write an experience, emotion or burden they wished to release and place it within the work.
The handwritten notes were later frozen into blocks of ice and gradually returned to the installation through a sequence of performances. As the ice melted, the notes dissolved back into water, creating a symbolic process of acknowledgement, transformation and release.
By the conclusion of the exhibition, more than seventy contributions had been made. The participatory process transformed the installation into a collective site of reflection, allowing individual experiences to enter a shared material cycle.
Following the exhibition, the collected writings were returned to the shoreline. Placed beneath the sand and left to the movement of the tide, they were gradually reclaimed by the sea, completing the cycle of acknowledgement, release and return that lay at the centre of the work.
Chapter One: The Path of Least Resistance marked an important stage in the development of ideas that continue to shape Muller’s practice.
Questions of participation, reflection, memory, symbolic transformation and the relationship between material landscape and internal experience would continue to appear across later photography, moving-image, performance and installation works.
The project established an early model for working between documentary observation and symbolic inquiry, using landscape not simply as setting, but as material, metaphor and active participant within the work.
