'Devil's Glen' documents a 'shamanic' walk in Devil's Glen, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, in the summer of 2005.

This idea is rooted in the ancient traditions of tribal cultures (e.g. aboriginal songlines) and references the work of contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Helen Chadwick.

Devil's Glen

Using shamanic techniques, such as rhythmic walking and internal chanting and Zen practices, my perception of and connection with my environment was heightened. The walk, upstream to a waterfall in dense woodland follows a path, which takes one past site-specific sculptures by international artists. On previous visits to Devil's Glen I've studied these but that day they merged with the organic forms of trees, rocks, plants, earth and water. I became immersed in my surroundings relating to everything but attaching to nothing. I criss-crossed the stream on three occasions, stopping to sketch or take a photo I would refocus briefly before allowing my self to slip back into a light trance.

The idea was to take this visual, sensory, and psychosomatic experience and to communicate this in surreal, representational images and text. I drew together a variety of images sourced from the walk and from my own reflective experience and collaged them into an inter-medial print. The resulting print-collage was finally overlaid with the bones of my pelvis and legs sourced from medical x-rays.

'Devil's Glen' is autobiographical. In a basic sense, transferring an x-ray negative of my pelvis and legs into a positive and printing this over the landscape, I'm making a statement about locomotion. As the legs are truncated, knees are missing, and there is abnormality in the physical structure it is also a paradoxically a statement of absence and presence, physical ability and disability.

For me, the repetition of text and image is important in the communication of meaning. Repetition reinforces and dilutes at the same time, it is the paradox of a mantra. A singular motif demands singular attention, it stands out requiring the viewer to focus solely on 'it'. Whereas multiples or repetition act in a subliminal way, diffusing attention and evoking meaning. Beuys and Kiefer both use repetition and shamanic rites, text and multiples in their work. Kiefer hopes to bring about healing, literally, by naming the wound and in this way effect transcendence through immersion in the material. Kiefer's material landscapes of thick paint, with names and inscriptions that are scratched into it, are a direct act of naming place and context, which calls for immediate reflection on traumatic historical events. In this instance text not only acts as verbal 'tempo', in keeping the rhythm of the painting, but more importantly, 'mediate(s) the visceral immediacy of the surface of the work, inserting a discursive element.'
(Morley 2003, p.173).

My intention is to create a narrative that could be interpreted as an acceptance and embracing of the landscape in all its transience. By symbolically manifesting myself as 'shaman' and overlaying my ghostly pelvis/pubis and coccyx/phallus over representations of nature I'm not only expressing an instinctual urge to remerge with the archaic mother, a pre-birth symbiosis but also I'm investing my libido in something that will eventually cease to be. In actuality, it can be argued; I'm already mourning the loss of the 'natural' environment and by extension the loss of my own embodied state. At the same time I'm affirming my identity, sexual and spiritual, through repetition of the word 'shaman' and the 'cascade' from the pubic area, representing libido.

However, this affirmation is ambivalent. Part of my psyche cannot bear the extremely painful process of mourning and it is the anguished tension between acceptance and denial that is symbolically represented. The repetition of text and images represents the continuous, always-relative coming to terms with transience.

The rigid rectangular structure of shapes symbolises a more repressive, controlling aspect of psyche, namely the ego. It also partly stems from a patriarchal desire to impose order on an apparently chaotic, unruly (feminine) environment. Although the images themselves are intended to represent flowing forms and evoke the heightened experience of the journey, the structures within which they are held speaks of a desire to control and dominate. From the background the swirls of wood grain are lost to the urgent incantation of the text, a magical word associated with an ancient tradition of spiritual communication. The bones also symbolise that tradition and are a manifestation of the need for unification. It is a cry for unity out of psychic pain as much as a physical representation of incompleteness.

Developing the psychological theme further, I will briefly discuss Narcissism, which is described by Whitebrook (1995, p.71) 'as desire's propensity to deny the harshness of reality.' This 'harshness' comes from Freud's formulation of the death instinct. The existential reality of death 'constitutes the principle affront to our narcissism, which consequently mobilizes the innumerable strategies of illusion to deny transience in general and death in particular.' (Ibid).

Before the introduction of narcissism, the concept of reality was neutral and simply the opposite of hallucination, afterwards reality becomes malleable and environment an imago, an idealised, mentally projected image, which can be shaped. Landscape (originally land-shape) therefore becomes a carrier of images and symbols. Jung (2002) states that 'All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected into our surroundings, and it is only by recognising certain properties of the objects as projections or images that we are able to distinguish them.' (Para.507, p.52) if these properties are not recognised as such it 'creates that characteristic relationship to the object which Levy-Bruhl has fittingly called "mystic identity" or "participation mystique".' (Ibid). This mystical participation is, in my view, at the heart of Romanticism. Jung goes onto say that if the Libido (life force, sexual energy) uses these projections to cathect positively to our surroundings it will alleviate the harshness of life. (Ibid). Whitebrook (ibid) argues that, "Freud's drive theory is not a biological doctrine but a theory of the frontier between soma and psyche - a theory of representation of the body in the mind." This provides a partial context but it also requires a Nietzchean framework, where Dionysian transcendence demands Apollonian resistance, 'both must "unfold their energies in strict, reciprocal proportion."' (1886, p.5 quoted in Sarafianos, 2005, p.7).

At this point I will refer to Helen Chadwick's Viral Landscapes (1988-89), which explore the interaction between body and landscape, abstraction and figuration. A photographic series of coastal landscapes overlaid with streaks of her cellular material. By combining the internal human material with the exposed geological features, striated cliffs with striated cells, a metaphor for enquiry into the synthesis of self and landscape is set up. In calling the landscapes viral, Chadwick (1989) subverts the metaphorising of illness, 'welcomes difference not as damage but potential' and evokes, 'territories of a prolific encounter, the exchange of living and informational systems at the shoreline of culture.' (p.97). For this project she also carried canvases and paint into the sea and allowed the waves to do the painting. A ritualistic act of submission to the power of nature.

In Conclusion...

Abendland (Twilight of the West) 1989
Anselm Kiefer
Lead sheet, synthetic polymer paint, ash, plaster, cement, earth, varnish on canvas and wood
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia


























































Helen Chadwick, "Viral Landscape No. 3", 1988-89. Photo Peter MacCallum.