Chapter One: The Path of Least Resistance
2017 | Multidisciplinary Installation, Performance & Participatory Work
Listastofan Arts Collective, Reykjavik, Iceland
Chapter One: The Path of Least Resistance developed during a residency at Listastofan Arts Collective in Reykjavik, Iceland. Bringing together photography, projection, sculpture, text, sound and audience participation, the work expanded the practice into a more immersive and spatial form.
Within the wider Landscape as Mirror, Self as Myth trajectory, the project marks a major shift from symbolic image and performance into environments that ask the viewer to physically enter, move through and contribute to the work.
Material & Spatial Language
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. Appearing as liquid, reflection, ice and projected image, it became a way of considering emotional movement, transition and release.
Volcanic stone, found objects and other natural materials grounded the work in place, while also carrying symbolic and bodily associations. Rather than treating landscape as something represented from a distance, the installation brought material elements of the environment directly into the work.
Across the installation, projected imagery, sculptural forms, sound and natural materials operated in relation to one another, creating an environment shaped by movement, memory, reflection and change.
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 expansion in the practice, bringing together photography, moving image, installation, performance and audience participation within a single spatial environment.
Questions of participation, reflection, memory, transformation and the relationship between material landscape and internal experience would continue to reappear across later works.