Hinterlands

 

'Between Worlds', Renmin University Gallery, Beijing, 2015


Susan Brind & Jim Harold

 

The installation, ‘Hinterlands’, comprises two related elements: a wall painting with vinyl text; and four unframed photographic digital prints arranged on adjacent walls.


The wall texts are taken from a mixture of diary notes and descriptions of photographic images made by the artists, Brind & Harold, over a number of years whilst on research journeys. The texts are not chronologically ordered but, instead, are intended to be read as a series of text-images. Through typographic layout and proximity, the texts become interrelated whilst not being the direct traces of a linear journey or journeys. Rather, they tell of the small moments of travel and experience (un-photographable in some cases) that act as the truer registers of a journey; whether that journey is outwardly bound or inwardly focused. As a result the work seeks to allow these events and the phrases used to account for them to become liminal spaces - thresholds or hinterlands - through which the viewer's own imagination may engage with the artists’.


The photographs of desert space, details of the desert floor taken in the Egyptian a Desert, are similarly intended as the traces of real events and locations, while providing ambiguous spaces of reading and meaning.