No fixed place for us

My inspiration for No fixed place is set for us came from a fleeting sentence in the book Dante’s Divine Comedy, A journey Without End by Ian Thomson. This work was recommended to me by the writer and critic John Mullan, whom I met while on daily walks among the dark, muddy woods of north London’s Hampstead Heath as the world emerged from lockdown, and I was searching for the theme of my book. The Heath was the setting for many conversations about Dante during the bleak early months of 2021.

The work’s initial development was a complex process, at times echoing the contorted, spiralling stages of Dante’s own Purgatory. I eventually refigured a series of photographs I had taken of Mount Etna. In medieval Italy, it was believed that the mountain of Purgatory was in Sicily, on the summit of Mount Etna. 

Repetition has been a regular feature of my artist’s books; I chose to experiment with this procedure, to invert and sometimes flip the images I had of Mount Etna, thus replicating Dante’s use of repetition and mirroring within The Inferno and Purgatory. The layout of each page is designed to be different from the next, with the space of the left-hand margin varying, an ambiguous space, that could have included a quote from Dante or other material, an open space that gives a fluctuating rhythm to the book’s reading. 

Dante speaks of the sapphire blue waters surrounding Purgatory, which I have reimagined using the tactile Curious Touch end papers of the volume. The book begins with images evoking the horrors of the Inferno and gradually moves through the smouldering volcanic landscape, ending with the crescendo of the blinding light described throughout Purgatory, signalling Dante’s entry into Paradise.

Elemental

On 17th August 2017, a ripple in space-time was detected as gravitational waves passing through our planet. Terrestrial and space telescopes revealed that two city-sized neutron stars collided at one-third of the speed of light, producing a kilonova. The universe turned the matter into gold.

Elemental has been acquired by the British Library.