CAVE DRAWINGS, 2022&nbsp;

During the UK lockdown I made a drawing a day... Abstract, subject-less pencil work where an ‘automatic’ surreal zone appeared on the paper. I looked up the word ‘doodle’ and wondered if it could be helpful to explain the method — ‘A drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied.’ Umm... there’s something here. However, the process did feel more mindful, like a process of drawing that consciously tried to escape recognition, while still drawing a line or mark that looked ‘right’ or corrected another. 

Things like the question of the thickness or size of a line, as well as the status of certain marks, hovered over my shoulder as I drew. I was conscious of the way that the result would inevitably evoke interpretation and meaning. Looking at clouds or smoke the pareidolic mind has the tendency to perceive and to impose a meaningful interpretation on nebulous stuff, seeing faces, animals, and stories in the ether. Marks can be symbolic and belong to a category that’s recognised as a particular meaning or significance. A cross, a star or even a dot can be read as a message. A line might carry an instruction, like an architectural plan or diagram, while its real partner might exist somewhere else in the world. 

William Hogarth, in The Analysis of Beauty (1853), set out about his beliefs regarding visual aesthetics, This book mentions the ‘Line of Beauty’, a certain S-shaped line ‘that excited the attention of the viewer and evokes liveliness and movement’. These Cave Drawings, far from being dreamlike depictions of gods or prey scratched into the wall, are more an unavoidable expression of the advantages and disadvantages of having a mark-making instrument in your hand. Scribbles, acratches, squiggles and scrawls — drawing out a drawing. 

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave refers to the imprisoned view that perception has of the world describing it, as a series of manipulated shadows on the back wall of the cave. This allegory was modified by Francis Bacon discussing his Idols of the Cave (1620), ‘where everyone has their own special cave or den which scatters and discolours the light of nature, so that the human spirit (as it is allotted to particular individuals) is a variable thing, all muddled, and so to speak a creature of chance.’ 

So, I invite you now to bring your conscious and unconscious biases, as well as an open mind, to float and engage with the ensuing pages.

GAVIN TURK

CAVE DRAWINGS 

Imagine… a letter written by Ariadne to Theseus, remonstrating with him for having abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Such a letter does exist: from the first century BC, composed on Ariadne’s behalf by the Roman poet Ovid. 

It is the tenth of Ovid’s Heroides or ‘Heroic Women’: imagined letters from eighteen heroines of Greek and Roman myth, taking to task the men who have betrayed or otherwise let them down. Some of the pairings are well known: Dido to Aenes, Medea to Jason, Deianira to Hercules; others less so: Oenone to Paris (he abandoned her for Helen). Ovid’s project might seem problematic in its implausibility. Greek heroines (and one Carthaginian) write letters in Latin, each about 150 lines long, in finely-formed dactylic pentameters. Ariadne, marooned on the desert island of Naxos, is presumed to have access to pen, ink, papyrus, and a reliable postal service. Further fundamental suspensions of disbelief are required. In addition to being written by a man, the poem-letters would originally have been declaimed before an audience dominated by men, and by a male performer, very likely Ovid himself. Not much space here, it might be thought, for the women, like Ariadne, who are supposedly the focus of attention.All this may help explain why, until recently, the Heroides were not seen as Ovid at his best; not a patch on his erotic verse; notably, Amores (‘Love Poems’) or Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Love’). The introduction to the edition I used as an undergraduate in the 1970s, edited by Grant Showermann, began with the discouraging words: ‘The Heroides are not a work of the highest order of genius. Their language [is] nearly always artificial, frequently rhetorical, and often diffuse…’ They were on the Cambridge syllabus, not as choice specimens of Latin literature, but as raw material for the stern discipline of textual criticism: scrutinising corrupt passages in the text as transmitted, trying to restore what Ovid ‘actually wrote’. Did Ariadne allude to Theseus’ oscula (‘lips’) or occulos (‘eyes’)? It was fortunate that the lecturer for the paper was the great E.J. (Ted) Kenney, who emphasised at every turn the qualities of the poems as literature. What follows tries to convey something of their subtlety.

What did Ariadne write to Theseus? Her letter is treated here as a supposed stream of consciousness, ordered for her by Ovid. 

She begins with a paradox: even wild beasts (a recurring theme in their imagined presence on Naxos) are gentler than Theseus in his abusive treatment of her. Then comes confirmation that this is indeed a letter: she presumes Theseus to be reading her words, written after her betrayal by him and by sleep itself (the first of her many personifications of things intangible and inanimate). Sleep-as-deceit leads into the narrative of Ariadne’s experience. She recalls the realisation of her desertion with a vignette which will have resonated with the audience then, and readers ever since: being half awake in the early morning, stretching out an arm, and finding not a person but an empty space. Typically trivial in the circumstances of our own experience, but her response is one of terror, with beating of breasts and tearing of hair (another motif). She wanders erratically along the shore, calling out ‘Theseus’; the rocks (again, personified) echo her cries, as if to offer help. (ll. 1–24)

Lent strength by desperation, she scales a mountain, which enables her to see Theseus’ ship far out at sea, in full sail: the very winds are cruel. Although deeply shocked she shouts with all her strength to Theseus to turn back his ship, which, as she puts it, lacks a member of its crew. Her words are mixed with renewed beating of breasts; then a touch (for us) of realism: she fashions a flag by attaching her veil to a long branch: shades of the Railway Children. Failure of this practical measure is followed by a ‘literary’ allusion. She describes herself as randomly ranging like a Bacchant, with resonance for Ovid’s educated audience, probably familiar with Euripides’ Bacchae, of women dangerously out of control. Ring composition returns the narrative to the bed Ariadne shared with Theseus, then deserted by him. She directly denounces the bed, having harboured both of them, as ‘faithless’; subverting thereby Winston Churchill’s alleged detestation for learning Latin on the ground (still familiar to some) that it pointlessly necessitated having to learn how to address pieces of furniture (‘O table!’). (ll. 25–58)

Ariadne’s thoughts turn to the future: what is she to do? The place seems to be deserted. Even were it possible to leave, where could she go? The backstory she now introduces of slaying the Minotaur demonstrates her ethical dilemma. Since she betrayed her father, Minos, by providing the thread that guided Theseus through the labyrinth, she must needs be an exile. In the ancient world, duty to one’s parents came second only to piety toward the gods. However, another is also guilty of betrayal: she quotes verbatim Theseus’ emphatic oath never to desert her. In retrospect, she wishes that the perjured Theseus had killed her as he slew her brother: a reminder that the Minotaur was, after all, part of the family. (ll. 59–82)

The idea of being ‘better off dead’ leads Ariadne to imagine death on the island through wolves, lions, tigers, seals, or men. For one of high birth like her, death might seem preferable to surviving as a slave; again, the audience possibly dwelt on the royal captives in Euripides’ Trojan Women. Her thoughts return to the threat from wild animals; nor can she depend on help from men, whom, thanks to Theseus, she has learnt to distrust. She harks back to the unfortunate circumstances leading to Theseus’ presence in Crete, her providing the thread, and his victory over the Minotaur. This prompts the conceit that Theseus, having heart of iron and breast of flint, was bound to win the fight. She calls to account sleep, the winds, Theseus’ right hand (killing her brother and now her), and his worthless pledge: all of them ranged against a solitary girl. (ll. 83–118)

Ariadne invokes the frequent motif (best known for us from Sophocles’ Antigone) that no one will give her decent burial. By contrast, Theseus is imagined safe back in Athens, boasting of his great deeds; she urges him not to leave out her help and his abandonment. His parents cannot have been mortal; surely they were rocks and the deep sea. Ariadne imagines that Theseus might, in his mind’s eye, see her wretchedness: how she can hardly hold her pen, her hand trembles so; a reminder that this is a letter. Then a concluding ethical appeal: she makes no claim on Theseus for her service to him; but he should not visit evil on her. If Theseus returns too late, he can at least carry away her bones. (ll. 119–52)

A bare synopsis cannot convey Ovid’s complex interplay of metre with meaning, or how he manipulates word order (far more flexible in Latin) to generate emphasis, surprise and suspense. Nor can we recreate the dramatic impact of the original performance. An imagined approximation might be the combining of modern dramatic monologue (Alan Bennet’s Talking Heads, or The Vagina Monologues) with the declamatory power of Beethoven’s aria ‘Ah! perfido’ (‘Faithless one!’). Though not included in the Heroides, it might well have been. The stand-alone piece by Beethoven had its origins in a now forgotten play in which Deidamia, daughter of the king of Scyros, denounced Achilles for abandoning her to fight at Troy. 

These and other, more accessible aspects of the poem, might loosely be labelled as ‘rhetoric’; defined even more loosely as ‘the art of persuasive speaking or writing’. Showermann, as quoted above, plainly conceived of rhetoric as something superfluous, negative, and possibly deceitful. But more recent approaches allow the legitimate possibilities of persuasion: winning people over to right belief.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 

A case in point might be the repetition, ring-composition, and even wit of the motif of Ariadne beating breasts and tearing hair. This being the expected response by women to the death of another, she poignantly presents herself as sole mourner at her own funeral. In the final few lines, she disarmingly admits to hands wearied with beating and not having much hair left to tear. There is complexity of narrative technique with intermingling of stories told: Ariadne on her present experience; what happened in the past; what she fears for the future. The technique known to us as focalisation sees identical events through different eyes; chiefly those of Ariadne and Theseus, but also via the entities repeatedly personified. 

Allusion to earlier literature, identified and embraced by Ovid’s informed audience, served to enhance appreciation. Suggested cross-bearings from Sophocles and Euripides stand as proxy for a mass of literary material, much of it lost. But for the Romans as for us, the obvious shared knowledge is of the wider myth of Ariadne and Theseus: knowing ‘what happens next’. (A generation of readers needs here to suppress recollection of Mary Renault’s rationalising if bloody version in The King Must Die.) No matter how wretched Ariadne feels, her bones will not have to await collection by Theseus. She is shortly to be rescued by and, with great pomp and circumstance, married to Dionysus. Moreover, we know the further fate of the faithless Theseus, meeting his just desserts (if not justice) at the hands of his wife Phaedra, sister to Ariadne, fatally infatuated with her stepson and Theseus’ son, Hippolytus. Details would be familiar from Euripides’ Hippolytus, reinforced by the fourth of the Heroides, the anguished letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus, both of whom end up dead.

It is now generally agreed that the Heroides stand in their own right as major poetry. But to return, by ring-composition of our own, to the opening question. How are we to respond to letters, supposedly written by women, that are actually by a man (and here being commented on by another male)? My teacher, Moses Finley, wrote sadly but resignedly in the 1960s of ‘The silent women of Rome’. Since then, marginal ways have been found of hearing their voices. But it remains overwhelmingly the case that Roman men wrote about women for other males. Can anything be retrieved from this apparent cul-de-sac? What seems striking are the many Greek myths highlighting women as shockingly treated by men. If myth may be read as reflecting communal subconscious, might this represent some kind of collective guilt? If so, why did Ovid, writing as a Roman, deliberately choose male mistreatment as his theme? One approach might see him as setting up an artistic challenge: repeatedly and convincingly adopting the persona (the Latin word means ‘mask’) of repudiated women. It is a virtuoso performance; more so than taking on in his erotic poetry the persona of relentless male lover. 

In context, what seems arresting about Ovid’s Ariadne is her agency in the carrying through of Theseus’ task, three times mentioned in her letter. She made a massive sacrifice to save him; he has given in return harm rather than help. The relationship that emerges between them is, in anthropological terms, instrumental rather than affective, with no hint, at least retrospectively, of what we would call romantic love. Reciprocity or ‘helping friends and harming enemies’ was one of the guiding principles of Greek myth and a major part of the ethical underpinning of Greek society and culture. That throws into relief Ariadne’s concluding sentiment about not requiring what is due to her from Theseus; she simply wants to be protected from gratuitous harm. Ovid presents her as ignoring the prevailing orthodoxy to occupy at the last, and with dignity, the moral high ground. 

P.S.

To read Ariadne’s letter and the other Heroides, there is the Penguin Classic verse translation in syllabic couplets by Harold Isbell (rev. edn 2004); alternatively, Harold Canon’s version in rhyming couplets (Unwin, 1972). The prose translation in the Loeb edition by Grant Showermann (1914) has a facing Latin text; the second edition (revised by G.P. Goold,1989) is more appreciative of Ovid’s poetic achievement. Renewed recognition of Ovid owes much to Cambridge classicists, inaugurated by L.P. Wilkinson’s Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955). Guy Lee brilliantly translated and commented on the Amores (Murray, 1968). E.J. Kenney wrote the introduction to A.D. Melville’s Ovid, The Love Poems, Amores and Ars Amatoria (Oxford, World’s Classics, 2008). Moses Finley’s ‘The silent women of Rome’ appears in his Aspects of Antiquity (Penguin, 1972). The transformational study of the Heroides is by Howard Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides (Princeton, 1974), followed by Florence Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: Epitsulae Heroidum (Princeton, 1985). Rhetoric as potentially positive was decisively reasserted by Brian Vickers (Downing Honorary Fellow) in his In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1989).

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Imagine… a letter written by Ariadne to Theseus, remonstrating with him for having abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Such a letter does exist: from the first century BC, composed on Ariadne’s behalf by the Roman poet Ovid.

Dear Theseus… yours faithfully, Ariadne

‘And suppose I did find those to go with me, and winds, and ship – yet where am I to go? My father’s realm forbids me to approach. Grant I do glide with fortunate keel over peaceful seas, that Aeolus tempers the winds – I still shall be an exile!&nbsp;’<a href="#_edn1">[i]</a>

‘No-one wants us. 
No-one hears us. 
No-one wants to help.’&nbsp;<a href="#_edn2">[ii]</a>

Naxos is an island in the Cyclades, the famous swirl of Aegean islands between Greece and Asia Minor that have been in-between spaces, staging posts, refuges, and sites of mortal danger from the uncertain timelines of myth to all periods of recorded history. The Eastern Mediterranean is treacherous water, with adverse winds making even short east-west journeys hard going. No wonder the great maritime Greek myths seem to take place within a relatively tiny geographic arena:&nbsp; leaving the Eastern Mediterranean was no easy feat. But go to sea they did because all the earth that was worth knowing could only be reached by water.

What of Theseus and Ariadne, fleeing from Crete under cover of night while the death of the Minotaur remained undiscovered? Land breezes and prevailing northerly winds would have aided their escape, the fugitives taking comfort in the fact that any pursuers would have to wait to give chase until the following night when the sea breeze relented.&nbsp; &nbsp;For ships to resist the pull of the land , sails had to swell. Had Ariadne the smallest inkling that Theseus meant to abandon her at the first opportunity, she would have done well to stay awake through the night until favourable winds changed direction mid-morning.

While sailing ships are now the preserve of leisure sailors and sportspeople, other less seaworthy vessels have made the Eastern Mediterranean once again the arena of dislocation, death, and flight, familiar from myth. Inflatables and small fishing boats ferry those fleeing conflict from as far afield as Afghanistan across the Aegean. At the height of the displacement in 2015-16, brought on by the escalation of conflict in Syria, over 800,000 people crossed into Greece from Turkey, with untold others perishing along the way.<a href="#_edn3">[iii]</a> In January 2022, the bodies of a child under three, two pre-teen girls, a man, and a woman were found off Naxos and neighbouring Paros. It is not known whether they were from amongst the seventeen people missing from a boat discovered on 22 December 2021 or the thirty-nine suspected dead from a capsized vessel on Christmas Eve that year.<a href="#_edn4">[iv]</a>

Naxos is no longer a desert island (was it ever?), but Ariadne’s ordeal played out for thirty-eight men, women, and children found on an unnamed, uninhabited islet on the Evros River between Turkey and Greece. They had been reported missing for days, but the search was delayed by a dispute between the two neighbours over whether their journey had ended on Greek or Turkish territory. Designated ‘unnavigable’, the Evros nonetheless deposited at least three hundred and ninety-eight bodies of would be migrants on the Greek banks between 2000 and 2019. What of the stranded thirty- eight who were taken to mainland Greece on 16 August 2022?&nbsp; Could the child reported to have died on the islet have been saved by a timely rescue? &nbsp;In the words of Baida, one of the Syrian women in the group, ‘No-one wants us. No-one hears us. No-one wants to help.’ 

Recast for different audience, Ariadne’s story has survived centuries of retelling,. She is the plucky princess, determined to help Theseus end the Minotaur’s reign of terror. She is the young girl in love, fearlessly abandoning social mores to be with the object of her affections. She is the erotic archetype from a patriarchal age, defenceless in sleep, available to all eyes. In ‘The Soothsayer’s Recompense, the inspiration for Gavin Turk’s “Ariadne Wrapped”, De Chirico made Ariadne into a symbol of loneliness and loss brought on by displacement. Ariadne in the twenty-first century is also Ariadne the refugee, fleeing systemic injustice and dictatorship. Our Ariadne has left behind all that is familiar and feels like home. When our Ariadne awakens to her abandonment, it is not just Theseus she has lost: it is the promise of safety and survival.

The story of Ariadne in transition resonates in Cambridge, a city built on the ebb and flow of populations, be it for education or work. Seventeen per cent of the population are students at the University of Cambridge, for whom the rail station is a portal to and from home. Internal and overseas migration powers the many industries of mind and materials that have enriched the city and expanded its influence. Long-term residents know that their neighbours, their co-workers, will change from one year to the next. In times of conflict, the city, designated &nbsp;a ‘City of Sanctuary’, has a history of stepping forward, finding homes for two thousand children from the Kindertransport and giving refuge to academics, thinkers, and artists who cannot return home. The University of Cambridge provides support to prospective students who are refugees or who have faced forced migration - &nbsp;the students for whom the journey to university is not the first wrench from home.<a href="#_edn5">[v]</a> &nbsp;And at The Heong Gallery, we work with artists in exile such as Issam Kourbaj and Ai Weiwei. Those of us who are “In search of Ariadne” might find her in all the hopeful travellers who come to Cambridge from elsewhere, to find sanctuary, betterment, and themselves.

<a href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Ovid. The Heroides X, lines 63-66 (G. Showerman ed. and trans., 1914). Loeb Classical Library.

<a href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62561578

<a href="#_ednref3">[iii]</a> https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/latest/2015/12/5683d0b56/million-sea-arrivals-reach-europe-2015.html

<a href="#_ednref4">[iv]</a> https://apnews.com/article/europe-middle-east-greece-migration-athens-a9d64c229ed14cce2492d5c66d792121

<a href="#_ednref5">[v]</a> https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/why-cambridge/support/refugees

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Prerona Prasad is Curator, The Heong Gallery.

‘And suppose I did find those to go with me, and winds, and ship – yet where am I to go? My father’s realm forbids me to approach. Grant I do glide with fortunate keel over peaceful seas, that Aeolus tempers the winds – I still shall be an exile! ’[i]

An Ariadne for Cambridge

Trompe L'oeil

Duchamp

Nomad

IN SEARCH OF ARIADNE LB: What first attracted you to the subject of Ariadne?

Interview -  Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa Buck

See her once, and you’ll be haunted by her: that is the nature of Ariadne. In classical mythology, she was the Cretan princess who betrayed her father, King Minos, and her half-brother, the monstrous, tragic, terrifying Minotaur. Minos had had his court inventor, Daedalus, build the confounding, disorienting labyrinth at Knossos to house the creature, who loved to feed on human flesh. The king demanded that Athens – a puny city compared to his own mighty Crete – send him seven girls and seven boys at regular intervals, to be piled into the labyrinth as a feast for the creature. But one year Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to be part of the grisly sacrifice. Ariadne saw him, longed for him, and decided to help him; in return, he promised her love, marriage, and a home in Athens. She gave him a sword, which he used to kill the Minotaur, and a spool of thread, which he used to navigate his way out of the labyrinth. They fled Crete together on an Athenian ship, putting in overnight on the island of Naxos. The next morning, in that blissful state between waking and sleeping, she reached out her hand to feel her beloved and found no one and nothing. She had been lied to. She was&nbsp;abandoned and alone. The Athenian ship was already a speck on the horizon. She veered from disbelief and panic to rage. After a while on that deserted shore, she was spotted by the god Dionysus and his drunken friends. The woman and the god made love and at length she found her place among the constellations.

That moment of Ariadne’s waking – lying on her rocky couch, one hand pillowing her cheek, the other about to reach into a languorous stretch, eyes still shut – was an artistic subject on repeat in the Greco-Roman world. We see her, this Ariadne between sleeping and waking, carved into Roman sarcophagi. We see her as the larger-than-life subject of one of the sculptures most celebrated in the Italian renaissance: the ‘Vatican Ariadne’, as it’s now called. The sculpture, or something like it, was already known to the cognoscenti by 1499, when an anonymous author in Venice printed his dreamscape of a book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In it, a woodcut illustration shows her as if she is a statue of a sleeping nymph in a wood. She does not yet know that she is being lustfully observed, in that woodcut, by a priapic satyr – that she is continuing a long career of being gawped at lasciviously. That viewer, of course, is also us, who can shamelessly, greedily run our eyes over her limbs, undetected by the object of our attention. And yet she is about to wake: what will happen next? Her in-between state, her vulnerability, puts us on the spot as viewers. There’s a life-size Roman Ariadne very similar to the Vatican version in the museum in Antalya, Turkey. I once heard a guide there addressing the fact that her breast is showing. It is like this, he said firmly, only because she is asleep. We can tell she is asleep because look, here, the sculptor has carved a lizard by her foot – it would not have come so close had she been awake. She did not, he implied, mean to be such a shameless hussy. Funny how we so easily offload our anxieties on to insensate lumps of rock.

The Vatican Ariadne was bought in late 1511 or early 1512 by Pope Julius II. At the time she was thought to be Cleopatra: the snakey bracelet on her arm was assumed to represent the asp that the Egyptian queen used to kill herself. In her original setting in the Vatican, she was surrounded a water feature – making her not just a queen but a kind of nymph. (Visit Stourhead in Wiltshire, and you’ll see this fantasy made real again: an 18th-century version of the sculpture, commissioned by an enthusiastic Grand Tourist, sits in her own cool damp grotto, turned green by the endless drip of water.) Quickly, though, she made her way on to canvas: she’s the image through which Venice invented the female reclining nude; you see her in Giorgione, and over and over again in the work of Titian. Once you’ve got your eye in, the haunting begins, you see her everywhere. Velázquez painted some tiny, exquisite landscape paintings: in one of them, a view of the gardens at the Villa Medici in Rome, she is there again, as a sculpture on a plinth on a terrace, the colonnade above her framing views on to cypress trees. (The real sculpture was another ancient version of the Vatican Ariadne; it’s now in the Uffizi, Florence.) Sleep and death are close in metaphor and in sculpture: at times church funerary monuments have something of Ariadne about them, especially those of the 18th century, when the deceased are allowed to recline elegantly rather than lie stiffly prostrate. In the 20th century Giorgio de Chirico painted Ariadne over and over again, placing her in shadowed, colonnaded squares, often with a train chugging away in the distance, her plinth inscribed with the single word ‘Melanconia’. Later still she dissolves into abstraction: I see her, even, in Carl André’s Equivalent VIII, a sculpture owned by Tate, which is (deceptively simply) a flat arrangement of bricks on the floor.

Gavin Turk is haunted by Ariadne, too. You can see her in his sculptures The Swimmer and Cyclops. She comes to mind when you see his The Shining, a sculptural reimagining of the form of the Overlook Hotel’s maze from Stanley Kubrick’s film. (Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is the Minotaur of that story, the raging monster at the centre of the labyrinth.) She is there in his Rough Sleeper – an Ariadne at her most vulnerable yet, curled up in a sleeping bag in a shop doorway, perhaps. He has placed Ariadne at the centre of Cambridge’s Station Square, a curiously anonymous, colonnaded space beyond which the trains chug, just as they do in so many of those de Chirico canvases. In this work, titled Ariadne Wrapped, the sculpture is trussed up in what appears to be canvas and string. She could be trapped. Or perhaps she is in transit, coddled against the rigours of a journey. Maybe the string will help her find her way. Perhaps, under her chrysalis, she is on her way to changing, transitioning between states yet more profound than sleep and wakefulness. At any rate, we cannot look at her. For the moment, she has found a way to be unobserved.

See her once, and you’ll be haunted by her: that is the nature of Ariadne. In classical mythology, she was the Cretan princess who betrayed her father, King Minos, and her half-brother, the monstrous, tragic, terrifying Minotaur. Minos had had his court inventor, Daedalus, build the confounding, disorienting labyrinth at Knossos to house the creature, who loved to feed on human flesh.

Ariadne, again and again

The planet is transforming. We are transforming.

There are myriad indications and signs, as the auspices sound an amber warning of a sickness in our globalised humanity: early skirmishes over basic resources, power, energy and food; cracks appearing in our democracies; social unrest and authoritarian rule.&nbsp;Nature itself is manifesting the feedback loops of systems out of balance. Where are the bothersome insects that have always busied around us: the tiny horticulturists and waste managers; a land army of industrious workers? Can we remember when we last heard the raucous yet exquisite dawn chorus of our operatic, feathered migrants – a quietening uneasy autumn after a glowering summer.

Instead, blurred by the moral ambivalence of our fantasy superheroes and the manufactured angst of reality tv, the forest fires, parched peat bogs, and urban land fires are blazing on the edge of our screens. Scenes of flooded barren monocultures and failed crops seep into our consciousness. Daily reports of bullets being fired in schools in America and nuclear power plants in Europe threatening meltdown, together with our personal experience of escalating costs and empty shelves are unnerving portents of the fragility of our contemporary civilizations.

From the rubble of these auguries, are sprouting green shoots of hope; pioneering leaders appearing in business, community and culture; growing consciousness around issues of social justice; the clarion voices of indigenous peoples rising above the noise; the new, unfamiliar calls to action appearing through every billboard, tabloid and at every supper. [3]

Humans are ingenious, imaginative and inventive, are we not? We have got this.

Within this context, this exhibition representing two decades of artistic preoccupation, poses deep questions. What is it of our history and our past that we value - that we even remember? How do we create meaning, let alone art, from the burden of a labyrinthine past that has led to this place, this aesthetic invitation? How did we arrive here: an intellectual, ethical and visual wilderness hidden within the solid walls of a university town.[4] A culture steeped in ancient practices, rituals and academic rigour.

Perhaps the paradoxes within the artist’s work are clues; golden threads through the darkness of our minds; the shadow play of our internal monsters; blind spots in the brightness, clarity and rewards of the sun. These objects are shapeshifters, simultaneously witless and childlike, and yet with a virtuosity of production and intellectual playfulness that leads us, like children, through the labyrinth of our time.

Within these isles and beyond, our European, Elizabethan epoch gives way to a new unknown era, as we each, in our own way, embark on a personal odyssey.&nbsp; In our search for meaning and value in obtuse and yet familiar objects, we are confronted by our natural curiosity: remembering the importance of valuing what we have, and where we are, and how we got here, so we can feel the possibility of our unknown futures.

The planet is transforming. We are transforming.

In Search of Ariadne – A Preface

It’s out it’s out 
When it was lit 
Light is out 
Just freshly out 
Out of time 
Out of here 
Gone up in smoke 
Missed the moment 
Missed the 
When it’s out it’s out 
When it’s gone it’s gone 
Who can bring back 
The missing light 
Turn smoke back 
Into fire 
Turn back time 
And the hour 
Make it all light again 
Kerze kerze kerze 
Against the changing times 
First there was light 
And it was good 
In ritual or in the dark 
Something to come home to 
Something to see on a hill 
In the night 
When the sun is gone 
And the moon’s not out 
But now maybe the gods 
Have done it 
Or we are the gods 
That did it to ourselves 
Just did it within 
The motions 
Of the clock 
Where they are no shadows 
Just the kerzesmoke 
Where once there was flame 
Or the absent flame 
In the ghostly presence 
Flame is concentrated 
Smoke wavers and drifts 
Sometimes the fire wavers 
But throws its light 
Into the far corners 
All the smoke can do is be 
A ghost, a wisp, a regret 
Nostalgia, a wish undone, 
Sometimes even an arch 
Of floating spirits 
Where the flames die together 
In empty rooms

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Just thinking of those 
Places 
Where the shadows 
Creep closer 
And the darkness 
Is given courage 
And the spaces that 
Had presences 
Shrink and retreat 
With the formless 
Dark advancing 
Not only in rooms 
But in squares 
In hearts 
In dreams 
In parks at noon 
In parliaments 
And the stock exchange 
In school rooms 
Where teachers are not free 
In the bedrooms 
Where the dark 
Comes between 
The warm bodies 
Turning cold 
In the streets 
That used to lead 
To the hill 
But leads now 
To the crossroads 
Where lamps have gone 
Out and the rats 
Grow brave 
In the undergrowth

&nbsp;

Can the smoke 
Bring back the flame 
Does the flame survive 
In the twisting form 
Without a name 
Can that which is out 
Be not out 
Can the dark 
Extinguish itself 
By itself? 
Can the candle 
Light itself? 
Can the heart 
Feel its own beat 
Can the feet 
Smell the socks 
Are moths 
Drawn to candlesmoke 
Can the light 
Put out 
Shine still 
From that hill 
Or among the flowers 
On the windowsill? 
Can we return 
To the source 
Can the source return to us 
Can spilt sauce 
Be unspilled 
Can spooled words 
Be unspooled 
Can the candlesmoke 
Illuminate 
The cobwebs 
Can the darkness brighten 
The walls 
Where children 
Read in silence 
While the clock 
Marks the time 
In the dark? 
Tick tock tick tock 
It’s out it’s out 
Keep your voice down 
Don’t shout 
No one can hear you 
When it’s out

&nbsp;

&nbsp;When the moon looms 
And shadows 
Advance across 
The land 
Tick tock tick tock Listen to the clock 
Ticking in the silent 
Candle 
On the mantlepiece 
But look, 
If you can see, There’s history 
Expiring slowly 
Slowly dancing 
Writhing 
Casting elegant 
Shapes 
In the fading 
Dancing 
Candlesmoke 
But the end 
Of things 
Can be so beautiful 
If anyone can see them

&nbsp;

That sullen 
Wisp 
Of charm ...

&nbsp;

Keep it lit 
While the song 
Lasts ...

&nbsp;

Missed the moment 
Missed the

&nbsp;

&nbsp;Ben Okri – KERZE, 2022

It’s out it’s out When it was lit Light is out Just freshly out Out of time Out of here Gone up in smoke Missed the moment Missed the When it’s out it’s out When it’s gone it’s gone Who can bring back The missing light Turn smoke back Into fire Turn back time And the hour Make it all light again Kerze kerze kerze Against the changing times First there was light And it was good In ritual or in the dark Something to come home to

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