"My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents."
- Carl Jung, 1934
This is a project born out of a feeling. The feeling of isolation, traveling through unfamiliar spaces away from crowds and yet ... traces evidence other peoples journeys, individual acts that collect into patterns and so a shared experience is created through the marks they leave behind.
In addition to exploring this concept, this series has also been experimenting with screen printing, and using the limits that this technique imposes in order to play with bold colours and silhouettes with subtle textures.
You huddle by the fire, warming your fingers and face by the glow. It sheds light only on your immediate surroundings, the darkness around becoming impenetrable in contrast. Its crackle and flicker block out the rest of the world until you feel completely isolated. Other dots of light flicker through the trees, evidence of far off stars and galaxies to match your own. Unreachable, yet their light travels all the way to you and you wonder how far your little beacon can reach, how many other campfires are lighting up the darkness, how many eyes are looking up at the same sky in wonder.
You trek along the quiet, dusty path, craggy cliffs to one side and on the other, a steep drop through trees that hide the valley below. An archway appears over the trail, created from the same stones it’s built into, an extension of the rock face. It crumbles down along the slope, a wall with no building, doors and windows leading to nowhere. Rust-coloured prints cover the surface, blending into one big smear of new prints and old, no way of knowing who made them or when. Some are scattered, those who looked for hard to reach spots, so that their print would stand out a little more from the rest. You reach down to the path to rub your hand in the dust, adding your mark to the rest.
The dirt path cuts through the wheat fields, the endless landscape of trees and rolling hills interrupted. This path is planned, purposeful, signposted to lead you to your destination. You come to another break in the grasses, a trail leading away, a path that isn’t really a path. Some may call it the path less trodden, but in fact, the broken grassy trail is one that has been created by countless steps. Those that wanted to go a different way, that disagreed with the directed route, wore away the grass with myriad footfalls until a path appeared out of the dirt. This is a path built out of desire, maintained by the collective unconscious.
You walk along the shore, pausing a moment as you watch the remains of a sandcastle disappearing under the rising tide. Sharp edges of sand hover over spaces that have already been claimed by the sea, threatening to collapse. Within the hour, it will be gone, washed away by the waves, a blank slate left for new hands to build upon tomorrow. For now, it resists, melting battlements reflecting those of the castle across the bay, one that may be older and more sturdy than this one, but these ruins too are subservient to time. Perhaps in a century, or in a millennium, once countless castles of sand have risen and fallen, the only traces will just be foundations.