An Archive of Exorcisms presents three years of searching for wonder amongst haunted forests and postindustrial wastelands that constitute this cursed isle. This exhibition deals with the fallout of modernity’s rampant march of “Progress” and the enclosure and separation of peoples from the land. The collection traverses time, space, and mediums. With an emphasis on the artist's life in Glasgow the exhibition presents a culmination of works including unearthly musical instruments, drawings and paintings, sculpture and bespoke furnishings, and multimedia recordings of site-specific collaborative performances. Dredged from the tortured landscape which bore them, these fragments are rendered as chaotic assemblages and social sculptures, wherein guests and accomplices are invited to quite literally inhabit these works and the wastelands for themselves.
This abundant collection of by-products forms a living archive of exorcisms. These exorcisms are enacted in ceremonies where site-specific instruments forged from the bones of the land itself are played as offerings to induce the voices of its past. The oscillating drones and groans produced through a collaboration with place immerse the haunted artist in meditation on the environment. In unearthing the trauma of the landscape and amplifying and working with its subjugated history, the mundanity of the chosen sites acquires majesty when animated once again through sonic vibrations. These exorcisms are performances and happenings that occur with or without audiences in the disenchanted hinterlands, consoling the ghosts that surround us as we seek collective commons in an alienating landscape where even peaceful forests and mountainsides are appropriated by capital.