HEAVEN; JUST ANOTHER RUIN 

《天堂的模样:它不不过是另⼀一⽚片废墟。》

Part I

A long time ago I did a visualisation exercise which revealed something about one’s personality. It asked you to imagine a path. At the end of the path there was a wall. You were invited to imagine how tall or short that wall was, what it was made from, how easy it was to get to the other side. Then you were asked, what was on the other side of the wall? I imagined a low stone wall, easy to get across, thinking about the walls you find in places like Scotland, Ireland, or Brittany. They are called “thin” places, mystical places where the veil separating our world and other worlds is permeable. On the other side of the wall I imagined old houses, old furniture, and ruins. At the end of the exercise it was revealed that the path you take is life, the wall you encounter is death, and what was behind the wall is the afterlife.

This exhibition contemplates afterlives and afterimages, as well as ideas of heaven and ruin. The title was taken from the short story ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ 《萤⽕火⾍虫之墓》 by Chinese science fiction writer Cheng Jingbo 程婧波. She writes about a dying universe where the lights of the stars are all about to go out. Drifting between fantasy and science fiction, space travel is fused with knights and magicians. The story feels at once like an ancient fairy-tale and a dystopian prediction of an apocalyptic future. The images I capture here were taken in Brittany, the hometown of my partner in France. It is a mystical place brimming with Celtic myths and Breton fairy tales. We ventured to a famous forest called Brocéliande, an enchanted place connected to Arthurian legends. We encountered the Val sans retour (Vale of No Return) where Morgan le Fay used her witchcraft to imprison unfaithful knights. They were turned to stone to form the landmark Rocher des Faux-Amants (False-Lovers’ Rock). There were other stories too surrounding the Fontaine de Jouvence (Fountain of Youth), a site of sacred Druidic worship, and the megaliths of Jardin aux Moines (The Monks Garden).

Within the images are ghostly absences, traces, reflections, and tricks of the light. Photography has long been connected to the Spiritualist movement since the late 19th century. Its early purpose included documenting battlefields strewn with the bodies of soldiers during the American civil war or the Victorian habit of capturing images of loved ones who passed away. As Susan Sontag famously wrote, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

What makes photography one of the most spiritual mediums is perhaps its connection to light. The power of light from a long dead star can haunt us into a future we may never see. As a result, the works speak to ideas around haunting and time travel by moving between past and present, memory and prediction. Myths, legends, and fantasies are fused with looming feelings of imminent environmental collapse.

List of Works

Black Jade, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 1189 x 678mm

Miroir aux Fees, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 1189 x 678mm
Fontaine de Jouvence, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 1189 x 678mm

Golden Shadow, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 677 x 841mm

Jardin aux Moines, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 1189 x 791mm

Morgan, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 678 x 1189mm

Rocher des Faux-Amants II, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 520 x 520mm

Rocher des Faux-Amants I, (2023)
Digital photographic print on textured cotton rag paper 1189 x 678mm