"Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'..."
Alfred Tennyson, The Foresters, 1892
"Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'..." Alfred Tennyson, The Foresters, 1892 “Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.” Herbert George Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1896 “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth” Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks, 1869-70 "It strikes me that the only way to know this place is through touch. To place myself inside it. Incorporate myself into its compressed landscape. To reside, for a while, within its shattered rooms. Its deserted chambers. To allow my arms and hands to become extensions of its oblique geometries. Gently plug holes and fissures with my own body. To feel it. Observe the impression left upon my skin by its obdurate contours. To bear its scars, clinging like kisses." Richard Skelton, Landings, 2009 Frottage noun (mass noun) The technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art. ORIGIN 1930s: French, ‘rubbing, friction’, from frotter ‘to rub’, of unknown origin. Curated by the photography collective ‘Inside the Outside’, Out of the Woods of Thought at Argentea Gallery features work by its founding members Al Brydon, Rob Hudson, Stephen Segasby and Joseph Wright whose collective philosophy hinges on a number of interconnected questions about how we relate to the landscape and the way in which this informs their representation of it in photographic form. Complementing this philosophy is work by a number of handpicked guest exhibitors that include Lynda Laird, Tom Wilkinson, J.M. Golding, Brian David Stevens and Guy Dickinson. 2nd November – 21st December 2018 Opening: Thursday, 1st November 6-8pm Series info: Centre for Alterity Studies. “Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 1923 “But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive.” Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 1971 “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Turning-point: Miscellaneous Poems 1912-1926 “My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.” Khalil Gibran, The Madman, 1918 "intermediary sentinels forgotten souls prowl and stutter. dust veiled echoes time forged tapestry her ashen veneer torn, bar a helix suture. from within, a still, penetrating stare sorrow lurking like a lost augury. ruined, not dead, she whispers a slow, staggered refrain. the silent chatter deafening." Guy Dickinson, Peripheral, 2017 "Seen from this high,
The fields have a terrible monotony." Randall Jarrell, Field and Forest, 1971 "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899 "Feeble traceries of twigs, the past Thrusts from the black mould of the present." Michael Vince, The Thicket, In the New District, 1982 “Even as commuters swarm on the pavements, even in its rush-hour pomp, even at the mid-morning peak of its fibre-optic frenzy, for all its lit glass towers and civic monuments, every industrial city is haunted by its opposite.” Michael Symmons Roberts, Visionary painter of the edgelands, Tate Etc. issue 28: Summer 2013 "...This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's most learned men are those who have memorised Zora. But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972 "I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does." Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time, Labyrinths, 1964 "... you advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city's midst or still outside it. Like a lake with low shores lost in swamps, so Penthesilea spreads for miles around, a soupy city diluted in the plain; pale buildings back to back in mangy fields, among plank fences and corrugated iron sheds. Every now and then at the edges of a street a cluster of construction with shallow facades, very tall or very low, like a snaggle-toothed comb, seems to indicate that from there the city's texture will thicken. But you continue and you find instead other vague spaces, then a rusty suburb of workshops and warehouses, a cemetery, a shambles; you start down a street of scrawny shops which fades amid leprous countryside. ... you have given up trying to understand whether, hidden in some sac or wrinkle of these dilapidated surroundings there exists a Penthesilea the visitor can recognise and remember, or whether Penthesilea is only the outskirts of itself." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972 “If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and late summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death.” Herbert Ernest Bates, Through the Woods, 1936 "As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all of Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972 "I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does." Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time, Labyrinths, 1964 |