I made it a ritual, almost every evening through the lock-down winter months of 2020-2021, to walk at Mynydd Llangyndeyrn, an upland common near my home. And what I glimpsed in the dimming light, partially and from the corner of my eye, was the constant strangeness of the ordinary.
This body of work is created in response to the luminous experience of those repeated twilight walks. It explores the far limits of perception: enclosing darkness, falling light, colours glowing up then darkening.
Consciousness is pattern-finding, a filtering process: information emerging from noise, order emerging from chaos. There is a blind spot in our eyes which makes vision possible; and there is a fuzzy edge to every shadow. This edge is our threshold to the world, our unique entry point. It is the place of overlap between information and noise.
There is value, therefore, in paying attention to the moments when vision dissolves. The moments of the seen becoming unseen and disappearing can reveal to us the mysterious gift of our own processes of imagination and perception, the ways in which we each encounter and re-create the world every day.
“Today is also the day of creation.”
Rebecca Solnit, ‘Hope in the Dark’
sian barlow 