The Explorer

About

The Explorer considers the individual in a vast, ominous, diverse, and surprising world. It is about the negotiation between self and universe, about disambiguation, the process of making sense of the world and a search for understanding and meaning. The precursor to this exhibition, Material
Transcendence, related to ideas about experience being rooted in physical matter, questioning whether this ever goes beyond the purely material. In a sense it focused on the ‘-geography’ in ‘psychogeography’ while The Explorer now reflects on the ‘psycho-’.

Rachel Gibson’s photographs are the diary of an explorer. She finds and shares the beauty and wonder in both mountains and moss, the transient and unchanging, and the footprints of other explorers, both past and present, overgrown and reclaimed by nature. Although we are presented with Rachel’s discoveries, the photographs contain a strong sense of the discoverer’s eye, inspiring others to likewise look anew.

Beatrix Calow’s prints and paintings reflect on the spiritual and physical explorations of travellers along pilgrim routes and in sacred spaces. A sense of the mythological in her imagery renders the figures and their relationship to the landscape both specific and overarching as ametaphor for the self in the world.

Holly Drewett records and documents sites in sound, imagery is then generated through listening. The initial drawing process is done blindfolded, generating a visual response not dominated by site, but shaped by other sensory reactions. Holly’s drawings and installations bring attention to the connectedness of the body to the world mediated through the senses.

Ruth Smith’s installations, A Very Slow Walk, echo the walk of a small child who takes seemingly forever to get from one place to another, not simply due to little legs, but mainly because everything is interesting and requires pausing for close examination. Hanging from quadrats, used for studying a unit space as a representation of a larger area, she displays her findings from re-enactments of these walks.

The works are distributed irregularly throughout the buildings at Worlds End Studios where they lie in wait for explorers to discover. While this may cause the visitor to double back, go around in circles, see the same works twice or more, or even miss some altogether, frustration at getting lost is balanced by the joy at coming across a work they are looking for, or not expecting to find.
Each visitor’s experience will be different, mirroring the ways we individually explore our world.