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The skin of the maze is porous. Tucked into its folds are parasites. Their coiled metal bodies are dressed in suffocating industrial skins that immunise against deep-time lag. These bodies have multiple births in Jurassic brine, silt, rock, on silica sand, most recently breaching in chromium trioxide and sulphuric acid. Here, their gravity is uneasy; an awkwardness I trust.
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Alice Channer (b.1977 in Oxford) is a sculptor whose work combines traditional and modern production processes to offer a synthetic replacement for both natural and industrial forms. She often explores the relationship between bodies, processes, materials and sculpture through highly attuned and sensitive formal arrangements in space. Alice Channer lives and works in London. She is represented by Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany.
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Some of these birds were found on the nearby beach and others died accidentally flying into my studio window. I take simple casts in wax and piece together the different species and have them cast in bronze. The different birds form conglomerates of sorts … they sit like glacial erratics of mixed geologies that have been gathered over time: Gannet. Curlew. Guillemot. Blackbird. Thrush. Greenfinch … two intimate groupings of birds from sea and land.
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Working from a remote studio on the west coast of Ireland, Dorothy Cross (b.1956 in Cork, Ireland) examines the relationship between human beings and the natural world addressing themes of time and transformation. She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.
The Textile works were inspired by the concept of the Labyrinth exhibition at Large Glass. It plays with the Greek mythology of the Minotaur and the idea of one continuous thread as the beginning of journey. The drawing suggests notions of uncertainty, dependence, sensuality and instability. The painstakingly needlework were initiated by a mistake in translating a given stitch from a book reference. The idea was to accept the mistake and move on as a stitch work.
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Tonico Lemos Auad’s (b.1968 in Belém, Brazil) art is characterised by a love of playing with natural materials. Drawing in various guises, including embroidery, is central to his practice but he also works with photography, sculpture and installation to investigate materiality, sensuality, process and the relationship between the audience and their environment. He is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil.
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Courtesy Private Collection, Hamburg
December (Pylos) is an ancient mitten for a friendly monster that drew a map on the back of her paw. Lazy sparkles are meant to encourage effortless walking and upward gazing. There are lazy sparkles in a few places; in Northern California, in Hannover Germany, in Tyresta National Park outside of Stockholm Sweden, and now in Dalby Forest. In each place they mark routes taken, while they are not trail markers. They physically exist. And they are magic. Looking for them is not recommended. Finding them by chance is.
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Through the activities of weaving and daylong walks, Helen Mirra’s (b.1970 in Rochester, USA) practice is engaged in the overlapping realms of ecology, conceptual experimentation, and bodily experience. Her methods and modes of expression create subtle and poetic pieces of art. Helen Mirra lives and works in Muir Beach, California. She is represented by Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin and Stockholm and Peter Freeman Inc., New York, USA.
Courtesy the artist
Moths are nocturnal but surprisingly colourful creatures that are, for the most part, invisible to us. Perhaps it is this essential and mysterious invisibility that makes them so compelling. Weaving a taxonomic pattern from their names and their colours, The Moth Wood charts the species that might live on and among the broadleaved trees of Dalby Forest.
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Alison Turnbull (b.1956 in Bogotá, Colombia) works primarily in painting and drawing, often transforming ready-made information — such as plans, diagrams and charts — into abstract paintings. Alison Turnbull lives and works in London. She is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
The Red Threads stretched between trees to form ‘lintels,’ suggest entrances to entice people into the labyrinth of the forest. A Cone of Yarn offers a way to plunge into the forest without heeding known paths and tracks but leaving the red thread as a record of one's progress so that one can retrace the route. By this act we complete both our own Labyrinth and resolve its puzzle.
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Mark Wallinger (b.1959 in Chigwell) is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his installation ‘State Britain’. ‘Labyrinth’ (2013), a major and permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. He is represented by Hauser & Wirth Gallery, London and New York, USA.
Law is an infinite maze, and my piece Origin of the Seven Stars appropriates a found legal text — a U.S. Presidential Directive signed off by G.W Bush — interweaving it with a folk tale from the Wyandot nation, a Native American tribe. Is law also a mythic story we tell ourselves across the centuries, and what are the implications if the United States colonises outer space as it colonised the territory of the Wyandot nation, and so many others like it?
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Carey Young (b.1970 in Lusaka, Zambia) has developed her artistic practice from a cross-fertilisation of disciplines including economics, politics and law. The tools of these different fields act as a material for her installations, text works, photographs and videos. Carey Young lives and works in London. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA.
——Tonico Lemos Auad, Dorothy Cross, Carey Young and Alison Turnbull
A forest is a place where we go lose ourselves — and, sometimes, find ourselves. A forest is a thicket of metaphors. A forest is a labyrinth: a confusing, bewildering territory, where one quickly becomes disoriented. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard observed: “We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of going ‘deeper and deeper’ into a limitless world.” The edge — the way out — can be terrifyingly elusive. A forest is an untamed version of its much more disciplined, domesticated cousin, the hedge maze. The paths of a maze are delineated and finite, and designed by human hand. The forest, by contrast, is wild and uncanny. Who knows what imps and witches, what monsters and nymphs, might be found in its glades? Will we ever find our way?
In the fairytale Hänsel and Gretel, the children are taken by their father and stepmother into the woods and abandoned. However, having overheard the grown-ups’ plan, Hänsel has collected shining stones, which he drops behind them so they can navigate their way back home through the dark and deceptive forest. Hänsel’s pebbles are like the red thread of Ariadne: the yarn the Cretan princess gave to the Athenian prince, Theseus. She instructed him to use it to find his way out of the original labyrinth of Greek myth, the one concealing the Minotaur at Knossos. She also gave him a sword, so he could kill the creature, her own half-brother.
Hänsel and Gretel reach home successfully, but the relief is only temporary: the very next day their father and stepmother take them out again, deeper and deeper into the forest. Having no stones to drop this time, Hänsel scatters crumbs, which are eaten up by the birds. The children try to find their way anyway. They walked for “an entire night and day from morning until evening, but they never came out of the forest,” recounts the Brothers Grimm story. Instead, Hänsel and Gretel encounter their own kind of Minotaur — the witch in the woods, with her gingerbread house and tempting sweets and cakes with which she fattens Hänsel up, planning to eat him. This time it will take all Gretel’s ingenuity and bravery to kill the monster and escape.
Dante’s Inferno begins:
“At one point midway on our path in life,
I came around and found myself now searching
through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost”
The narrator is wandering in a “wilderness, savage, brute, harsh and wild”. He has been “full of sleep”. His disorientation is not just physical but spiritual; he has been in a state of sin. He can see a beautiful mountaintop far ahead of him. He tries to head for it, but his way is barred. He cannot go there directly. (The first rule of labyrinths and mazes is that to reach your destination, you must first turn away from it; it is always the indirect route, the circuitous path, that will get you there.) Instead he is conveyed to another labyrinthine space, that of inferno, or Hell, with its “ruinous topography”, as Jorge Luis Borges described it, of “crypts, pits, precipices, swamps and dunes”. Once, Borges said he thought of “the world’s literature as a kind of forest… I mean it’s tangled and it entangles us but it’s growing, a living labyrinth, no? A living maze”. Books, forest, labyrinth: all blur into one idea. He thought of libraries as labyrinths too. Pluck a book from a shelf — take another path through the woods — and you can be transported, imaginatively, to another world.
Dante’s guide through Hell is a fictionalised version of the real Roman poet Virgil, who knew his way around the shadowy, confusing geography of the Underworld, having created a version of it for his great epic poem the Aeneid. Virgil’s hero, Aeneas, also has to navigate a forest before he can reach the portals of the land of the dead. “The entire heartland here is thick with woods,” his guide, the Sibyl of Cumae, tells him. In order to guarantee his exit from the Underworld, he must first find and pluck a golden bough that grows in a “deep shaded tree”. Everything in this liminal, strange territory between the lands of the dead and the living is dusky, shadowed, overhung by trees. The Underworld itself is like a wood:
“On they went, those dim travellers under the lonely night,
through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm,
like those who walk through woods by a grudging moon’s
deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark
and the black night drains all colour from the world.”
The forest is not always quite so grim, or Grimm. Shakespeare, in his marvellously free and indirect way with Greek myth, has his Theseus taking a version of the Cretan labyrinth home with him to Athens in the form of the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — the setting for the play’s love games, confusions of identity and transformations. Here, Titania falls in love with Bottom, who has magically acquired a donkey’s head, and a quartet of lovers are sent on a bewildering, circuitous chase after each other, thanks to a potion mistakenly administered by the fairy Puck. It is, according to Titania, a “mazed world” — though it is also a world of enchantment that, in the end, the human characters can safely leave, when this midsummer night ends, for the sane and everyday city. But still, the wood changes those who have entered it. No one leaves the labyrinth unmarked.
Charlotte Higgins, March 2020
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Charlotte Higgins is an author and journalist. Her latest book is Red Thread: On Mazes And Labyrinths. She is the Guardian’s chief culture writer.
Courtesy Charlotte Higgins and Large Glass, London
