Exhibition at the Hostry, Norwich Cathedral in August 2018

the spirit wraps around me

What would it be like to wear the landscape like a skin? To be sensuously wrapped in those elements? A question that has become crucial to our times. Supposing, instead of walking on a footpath or a beach, we were walking IN, or inside an ever changing kaleidoscope of texture, colour, light and process. Supposing we were literally cloaked in our surroundings? “Cloak” is a concept that we usually only apply to our clothes, which we generally regard as an extension of ourselves. In reality we are constantly immersed in a multi- sensual exchange with our surroundings.

“Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world’s becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell.” Tim Ingold

In this body of work, each cloak is made with materials from a specific Norfolk (UK) habitat – tideline, reedbed and barley field. The cloak mediates between the human body and the landscape it emerges from. It’s an invitation to immerse oneself in the more than human world, like plunging into cold water. More than that, by referencing ritual cloaks, it opens up the possibility of a connection with the genius loci, the deep spirit of the land.

 

 

 

Other works from the exhibition

Tide Lines

Shield

Shekinah

Throughstone