Artists Vic Dawson and Julie Sleaford share an interest in the psychology of belief systems and the contradictory nature of technologies that both document evidence and conjure illusions.
Having turned a caravan into a Camera Obscura, darkroom and recording space, Dawson and Sleaford invited participants to pose for them, share their encounters with mysterious events and bring along objects charged with a powerful personal resonance. Inside the dark chamber of the caravan they received the ghost image of each participant as it travelled through space and time via a lensless pinhole in the side of the caravan.
Participants were then invited inside the caravan to have their stories recorded onto a loop of tape and their possessions captured on film by a flash in the dark to explore how we project a narrative onto the world around us.
The artists ventured out into the Essex countryside to scratch its pastoral surface and reveal the wraiths of buried anxiety that shadow our collective conscience. In the series ‘Preoccupied Spaces’ the mythic past wanders like a ghost through the landscape of the present.
‘Manifestations’ mimic the spirit wax moulds made by Victorian mediums to provide proof of the paranormal. In this display of simulacra, the hands and objects give physical form to messages and communications from another dimension.
