Darkness Retreat

Keywords: Darkness, volume, caves, practice
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

In 2018 I visited a Darkness Retreat in the Black Forest, Germany. I had spent time caving previously and wanted to investigate the experience of being immersed in profound darkness. I was in the dark for 60 hours and although I walked around the perimeter of the small room in the light, after a few hours in the dark I found it hard to make sense of the scale of the space that I was encountering. In fact, I began to feel so uncertain that I was unsure whether I was awake or asleep. This experience, along with a field trip to Mother Shipton’s Cave, was the basis for a digital artwork commissioned in 2021. Mother Shipton’s Cave in Knaresbrough, UK is a small, unassuming cave, it isn’t dark or deep. It is, however, a volume in which fast and slow geologies are at play. The petrifying waters around the cave turn anything that sits in them to stone and the mysterious inhabitant was a prophetess, able to see the future.

In making ‘Darkness Retreat’ I was inspired by a collision of the experiences of the retreat and the cave; the strangeness of deep darkness in a very ordinary room and Mother Shipton’s Cave, an unassuming cave in which both prophecy, and setting in stone are possible.

During the session I would like to reflect on this work and the ways in which edges of the most ordinary of spaces can soon blur into the extraordinary.



https://www.legionprojects.com/darkness-retreat