Hinterlands is a group exhibition that invites us to consider our relationship with the land and its ecosystems. Rooted in the landscape of the North East of England, the exhibition explores its histories, legacies, mythologies and potential futures for its custodianship. Considering land and place as a complex layering of relationships, it explores this idea through the possibilities of materials and contexts: geological, biological and social, shaped and hardened by history.
Reflecting on the idea of hinterlands, or what lies beyond the visible or known, the exhibition brings together new and existing works by artists connected with the region. They engage with how the landscape has been occupied through processes of power, oppression and violence. They consider the role of alchemy, witchcraft and folklore, seeking sensitive thresholds, and collapsing boundaries. Foregrounding the land’s own agency, the works in the exhibition address these questions through the artist’s processes, which include witnessing, human and more-than-human relationships, speculative fiction and world-building.
Symbols merge together to weave a tale, a portal to another place. we tell stories through words and capture them in drawings, since the beginning of time pictoral language has been used to share information.
The banner is an emblem that can represent yourself a tribe or a collective group of people. Like a procession march it collectively unites people. A mark in the landscape that claims territory of the lands. A community of people united under one design a crest / shield that protects and hold power for the individual pulling strength and pride for oneself. We’re interconnected with the landscape from the foods we grow and harvest to the bricks and mortar of our homes, we started with sticks and fires and evolved. Elements connect to one another repelling or contracting growing and expanding together.
Kambo’s works in Hinterlands include new and recent banner works. Include many of her recurring motifs or symbols. The serpent, referencing evil and good, black and white the balance of life and light and dark. Hands also appear, hands that create, shape, mould and hold, the presence of the mother, the protector. Eyes to perceive and nazar (negative gaze). A maze is a journey where you enter as one person but leave changed. as time progresses and you walk a path with twists and turns you turn to navigate the landscape to find the endpoint - the exit to the next space. Like the origin dot, the beginning and end of all things we expand out and then shrink back a single molecule.
Within the banners, a journey occurs pathways are formed through the relationship of symbols connecting the human form and wider cosmology with alchemic combinations. The sun's heat and energy appear to warm and provide power and nutrients for plant growth cycles of energy, transferring from one thing to another consciousness, our souls and spirits live beyond the human body. Morpheus is there too, the god of dreams – as a gateway to the unknown world - the metamorphosis.
