Inverted Kingdom #2
The Inverted Kingdoms.
This work is an exploration of two themes. The first being the relationship of the observer and the hidden revealing itself and the second the idea of mythological landscape.
The photographs were taken over a number days at dawn on Lough Conn. I wanted to capture the Celtic concept of doorways into the 'other'. The most common of these doorways was always water. Hence the vast amount of ceremonial votive artifacts that have been recovered from water all across Europe. We see a modern descendant of this practice in wishing wells. This practice is by no means unique to European cultures and can be form in various forms across the world. But it is the Gaelic landscape that inspired this work and gave it context in Gaelic myth. Therefore my interpretation is a Gaelic one. I was looking for perfect mirror stillness in the Lough that would reflect the landscape and in that review the hidden Kingdom, the Inverted kingdom of the other.
The positioning of the individual prints is to create the feeling of windows. I wanted to distance the observer from the Inverted Kingdom. It is only a glimpse of the other they cannot enter. In this case there is the physical barrier of the 'Window'. The 'Window' is a physical border into a mythical world.
