Where the Mountain Hare has Lain

Several years ago I came across Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Shōrin-zu byōbu (Pine Trees), a pair of large-scale paintings on folding screens made in Japan around 1595. They struck me immediately for their ability to conjure more atmosphere and depth in their negative space than in their loosely painted conifers that recede into the mist. Taken on their own, each section of the screens offers a window pane; a fragmented and framed vignette eluding to both something and nothing. However, taken as a whole, a folding screen becomes a landscape full of depth and narrative, which although fractured, makes absolute sense.

Inspired by this, I began to play with splitting negatives into individually printed pieces of paper, which on their own are torn recollections and impressions, but together form souvenirs that existed in a time and place. They are repaired memories, full of the illusory character of a dream. Coincidentally, there is an allusion to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which broken ceramics are repaired with gold leaf.

In this series, applied gold leaf makes its way through some of these impressions, focussing on heightened sensory elements and tying the compositions together. Tōhaku’s pine tree paintings were large in scale, each screen measuring 157x356cm. By contrast, the small, tangible scale of my pictures is a reflection of their intimacy. As depictions of the landscape, they are purely non-representational; their fractured nature intended to evoke the fragility of dreams and the impermanence of our memories.

‘Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.’

W. B. Yeats, from Memory