Stones for Dancing, Stones for Dying, 2016
Castor Projects, London
www.castorprojects.co.uk
click link below to view film
LINK TEXT


‘Dirty orange and purple shards of light cut through foliage before darkness.
It wasn’t particularly beautiful but some sense of urgency caused the child to look at it for those brief few minutes before it dimmed away to a dulling blur behind the treeline opposite..’ *

Stones for Dancing, Stones for Dying explores the relationship between inherited body memory and landscape. Using film, photography and sculpture the work explores how the intense residue of memory can be located through quiet gesture, landscape and the objects we carry around with us. The persistent stone-like forms from McMillan's practice over the last five years, which reflect internal and external landscapes, can be found throughout the exhibition. The works persist as an open-ended dialogue between abstraction, felt experience and memory, a sort of visual poem.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the 1953 film ‘Figures in a Landscape’, narrated by poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, about Barbara Hepworth and her engagement with the Cornwall landscape.

* Taken from a story by London based curator and writer Daniel C Blight titled Magpie for Anxious Objects, the full text accompanies the work and can be viewed on Castor Projects website.

Photographs by John Chase and the artist.