This collaborative exhibition was the outcome of a conversation between the artists and an eerie encounter with bryozoa or moss animals along the shore of Lake Vassivière on a recent trip to the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage in France. Bryozoa (from the Greek βρυόν ('moss') and ζῷα ('animals') are aquatic invertebrates, which take a vast range of forms, in this case jelly-like clumps dotted along the lakeshore or hanging from branches. They are not "native" to France but have perhaps arrived due to increasing temperatures and plankton populations.

I was lucky enough to co-exhibit and co-curate with Sarah Strachan who senses environmental changes through deep conversations with people, place, the land and the materials and objects associated with these. The encounter, depicted through a series of drifts folding in the lines of a poem written by the artist, signifies the sensation of being somewhere familiar but with something outside one’s familiar knowledge or perception. In this case, aesthetic forms on the shore line which on closer inspection are not rocks but gelatinous aliens. It is this state of in-betweenness - polymorphic and protean in nature - that Sarah seeks to evoke with her ceramic sculptures..

These qualities spoke to elements of my own work, in which unexpected visitors emerge, displaced in time or cultural setting. Taking a range of forms, from the patterns and symbols of the funfair, to participants in abandoned cultural practices, these visitors are manifestations of a sort of solastalgia, a longing for a time and place that has disappeared. The resulting scenes are half-remembered, and  half-imagined - as cultural identities scatter and diffuse, they take the place of concrete memories or traditions. There is a catalog/price-list of my works in the exhibition here.