Terra Incognita
Artists; Bernice Corcoran, Rachel Doolin, Peter Nash, Kevin O'Shea, Diarmaid O'Sullivan, Tomas Penc, Laura Perrem, Sarah Roseingrave, Tom Doig and guests
Terra Incognita explores the interior and exterior notions of the unknown. Towards the end of the Victorian Era it was feared that a collective state of claustrophobia would ensue. This was largely due to humanities successful mapping, marking and dividing of once unexplored regions and the categorisation of all discoverable life on earth. Now it seems we look up. Yet, what is to be said for looking around and placing oneself in a world that is now crisscrossed, bordered but still in a state of constant flux.
“The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen on which a culture or individual can throw their fears and aspirations. Like Echo’s cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it. The blank spaces on a map-‘blank spaces for a boy to dream gloriously over’, as Joseph Conrad once called them-can be filled with whatever promise or dread one wishes to ascribe to the,. They are places of infinite possibility.”
-Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind, a History of Fascination, 2003