Melanie J. Alexandrou: June 2011

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Wild Thing, Paradise Mill, Barnaby Festival 2011, Macclefield

"Generally speaking,
a howling wilderness does not howl:
it is the imagination of the
traveller that does the howling."
Henry David Thoreau

The boundary between the wild and the civilised is a long recognised one, both
determining and representing a divide between chaos and order, the unknown and
the familiar. Fuelled by myth and folklore, people have either feared what lies in
dense woodland and unexplored moorland beyond the safety of town boundaries or
have been fuelled by a desire to conquer it.

Literature is riddled with fictions of forests as terrifying places, nurturing fears of wild
animals and other mythical beasts. The fear of being cast out into the forest to exist
as part of the unchartered and the otherworldly abound, along with the terrors of
town dwellers of what these castaways may become.

The edges of towns have come to function as hinterlands, becoming liminal spaces
existing somewhere between myth and reality. In these non-spaces where the edges
of the known and unknown meet, boundaries are blurred and the definitions of man,
animal, order, chaos, the wild, the civilised, and fact and fiction are broken down.

Wild Thing presents the work of seven artists who consider the complex relationships
that exist between man, animal and wilderness. Diverse in media, each work reveals
a unique perspective that exists somewhere between the familiar and the unfamiliar.