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LAURA DALY
TRAIL
3 July - 15 August 2004
Participate
Critical Text by Andrea Phillips
ArtSway is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Laura Daly who has been developing site specific research over the last few months.
Taking the landscape of the New Forest and its ancient folklore as the basis for her investigations, Laura Daly has conducted research into the mythological character ‘Laurence’ - a notorious will-o’-the-wisp and inhabitant of local bogs and heaths. Gathering opinion through formal methods of investigation such as observation and speculation, using historical texts, old maps and interviews, significant sites have been discovered that point to a new location for Laurence and provide the basis of a filmed tour.
By using 360 degree panoramic photographs to document the original sites and reflect their layout and form, Daly gives the investigation a grounding in factual observation. The film is speculative, presenting a two screen installation that reveals both aspects of ‘looking’ and being ‘looked for’ with projections placed in oppostion. Searching through space to detect activity, the viewer will then mirror the on screen narrative. Reinforcing the plausability of the project, the work is authenticated by the inclusion of various supporting materials, including maps, found images and documents, collected during research.
Playing with the notion of hiding and searching by creating a trail, the route will also be available on handouts, suggesting the audience explore the outside space and continue the work beyond the gallery context. Following a series of clues, by setting up and proposing this dialogue between audience and content ‘Trail’ alters the traditional role of the audience as they are encouraged to question their own defined concepts of space.
Laura Daly was artist in residence at ArtSway during April and May 04 as part of the Pro[duction] residency scheme funded by Arts Council England.
Laura Daly has exhibited both in the UK and abroad, she was the prize winner in BT New Contemporaries (1993-94). Previous exhibitions include ‘Sleeping’, 2001, film screening, Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich, Switzerland; Untitled painting installation, ‘Generation X’, 1996, Manchester. She currently has work in Re:Thinking Time, Peterborough and is undertaking a Phd at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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Artist Walk
Laura has prepared a walk in the north of the forest - an area still dislocated and isolated - as a suggested location for Laurence's subversive activities. The gallery text includes a detailed walking guide aimed at prompting visitors to explore spaces outside of the gallery and to investigate the space around them in new ways. ArtSway is hosting an artist led walk with Laura Daly on 31 July at 7pm (see Participate).
Critical Text - Andrea Phillips
"It’s very easy to get lost in the forest, to be led astray by strange lights and noises. This truism, the basis of psychic fantasy and fairy tale over centuries, is played out in Laura Daly’s Trail, an installation of film and photographs at ArtSway.
What does it mean to get lost? Why do we set out to lose ourselves for leisure, for pleasure, on a regular basis? Daly’s work, which begins to illustrate residues of the supernatural in the New Forest, suggests that getting lost is both disturbing and revealing. Leaving the motorway, losing ourselves to stories of the trees, the sky, the planes and the streams, we give up something of the urban condition. We give in to – are engulfed by – a loss of modernity. In the forest, maps seem irrational, noises seem strange and light sources unreliable. We are spooked, alienated, we are made to think about this by Daly’s work.
The installation consists of a set of four long 360² panoramic photographs, taken at various spots in the New Forest landscape at twilight on a long exposure, so that the change of light is visible on the images, moving from daylight to deep blue above the moor, trees and bracken. Added to this, two digital films, shot at the dead of night using torchlight, are projected opposite each other, engulfing the viewer in darkness, pre-empting and startling at strange irradiations, illuminating tree branches or bracken bushes suddenly, then going out. After these nightly images, the third part of the work is a walk. Daly provides the details of a short tour that circulates through the local area, and despite the fact that she has helpfully provided GPS information to make sure we do not actually get lost, it’s impossible not to wonder what her intention really is.
For Laura Daly shares in the name of the New Forest’s major spirit, Laurence, or Will O’ the Wisp, or Puck. When she instructs us to walk the forest as she has done, we know her to be both the source and the perceiver of the strange lights that make up Laurence’s form. Tricking herself into belief, Daly gets lost in mythological tales of dancing devilish lights, produced by Marsh Gas, and the phantasms that they invoke. The names of the sites of her photographs are revealing: Puckpit’s Inclosure, Laurence’s Barrow, Puck’s Hill (or Tom Pook’s Hill) and Col- Pix’s Cave. Daly brings us back into contact with the careless devilry of fairies and ghosts, along with their dangerous cruelty and sexuality. Walking and working alone she reminds us of why Freud loved fairy tales (and Angela Carter after him): that women getting lost in the limen of twilight have long been a condition of fantasy, both theirs and others.
All Laurence’s legends entail a leading, a following, a walking into fear. But Daly’s walk reminds us of other, more prosaic uses of these legends. As the walk takes us through Fritham (past the pub), past enclosures, earthworks and churchyards, the social basis of myths reveals itself, for, to go with Laurence is to trespass into mythic space, and to trespass is to tread on someone else’s land. Most Laurence or Will O’ the Wisp legends depict the figure as a set of lights or small fires leading people into dangerous territory. Laurence figures in folklore in all countries and cultures that have wet and swampy soil conditions – places where it is hard to grow things and scratching a living is a poor pastime. In England he is Shakespeare and Rudyard Kipling’s Puck, and in France the Feu Follet (dancing lights) that sorcerers turn themselves into to lead men and women to their deaths in the wild open air. In New Brunswick Lumbermen’s legends he is associated with drunkenness, and in Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Will O’ the Wisp (Le Feu Follet) he is a heroin-addicted suicide, searching in his last 48 hours for a reason to keep on living. Laurence is, in many senses, a wandering facet of men’s own self-inflicted abandon, desire for escape, hallucination and entropy. That he exists in the woodlands is not simply a fact of chemical chance, for the forest is a place of feudal cruelty where trespass and poaching were long punished with death, and whose paths are still governed by recriminatory laws.
When Laurence legends were born, walking the land was a necessity for most, a way of reading the soil in order to make it more understandable, and a way to vent feelings of oppression and resistance. Daly brings the magical quality of the newest technology to these narratives in order to create a space in which we might imagine ourselves as part of Laurence’s – and thus the landscape’s – story. At a time when getting out of the car and walking is in itself a strange thing to do, her work is persuasive, as she motions us to the oblique and fascinating places we might go if we lose ourselves a little."
© Andrea Phillips, June 2004
Andrea Phillips is a writer and art historian, and currently Assistant Director of MA Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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Gallery Talk Saturday July 31 2004 2pm
Join artist Laura Daly and ArtSway Director Mark Segal for an informal tour of the exhibition. FREE
Artist Walk Saturday July 31 2004 7pm
Join Laura Daly for a twilight walk through suggested locations for the will-o'-the-wisp subversive activities. FREE
Writing Workshop Saturday July 17 2004 2pm
Writing workshop with Markus Lloyd inspired by the themes of Laura Daly's exhibition. COST £10
Little Dragons Saturday July 17 2004 10:30am - 3:30pm
Join artist Annabel Richards in this fun art making day for children ages 3-5 years and thier parents, carers and/or grandparents. Based on the themes of Laura Daly's exhibition. COST: £4 per child.
Holiday Workshop 1: Will-o'-the wisp in the New Forest
Wednesday 4 August 2004 10:30-3:30pm
A fun workshop with Kate Groomsbridge inspired by artist Laura Daly's exhibition at ArtSway (for 7-11 year olds) COST £20
Artist Talk - Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva Saturday August 7 2004
Elpida made the Butter Wall in 1999 and produced Ambush in the Rhinefield Ornamental Drive in 2001. This is a chance to hear what she has been doing since and what she has planned for the future. This talk is part of the Art, Artists, Audiences and Intimacy Project. For information on this project, please click here. FREE (Booking Reccommended).
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