Lone Pine Club by Hayley Lock

About

Lone Pine Club presents work that explores the marginal areas between conscious and unconscious activity. The research that Hayley Lock has undertaken has focused around Austin Osman Spare, an artist who worked across a number of areas and touched on many subjects including the occult, surrealism, automatic drawing and spiritualism. Spare has been posthumously connected to a number of groups, ideas and ideals, in an attempt to understand his approach and focus, leading to a number of myths surrounding him. It is clear that he trod his own path, exploring a variety of interests and amalgamating a number of different sources to develop his own philosophy, the Zos-Kia Cultus, which was a hybrid of magic and religion. The exhibition takes its title from the children’s books and subsequent real life club for readers from the 50's by Malcolm Saville that is referenced in Phil Baker's book Austin Osman Spare, The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist. The phrase 'and we had adventures in our heads' connects the books with the mythologies that surround Spare.

Hayley has been adopting a similar approach to Spare in terms of assimilating ideas from a range of sources to inspire the production of work that suggests a common philosophy and belief, resulting in an over-arching ethos that is intangible, indefinable and indistinct. By producing works with common connections, whether symbolic, graphic or of material, themes are inferred for the viewer to adopt or reject as they see fit.

The exhibition inhabits three rooms, each having a particular thematic approach. One room presents a short looped film that has been inspired by Spare’s use of the ‘death posture’. This is a physical position that is adopted in order to connect mind and body to enable a deep imprinting of specific goals. Taking ideas from meditation, asanas (yogic poses) and psychological imprinting, Spare developed his own approach and technique. The film consists of a montage of diverse but connected found images that have been combined to suggest a loose narrative, but one that is intangible and unclear – with a meaning that will always be slightly out of reach. A female character features who is representative of Spare’s female spirit guide, a persona Hayley has adopted for the production of the work. The soundtrack and the film have an element of vibration that is integral to their function and also connects to Spare’s work.