I didn’t intend to use paintings as a starting point, but there is something compelling about animating these still images, so here is a reworking of a second painting from the series inspired by the stations of the cross. I wanted to draw parallels between the Christian story – particularly the Protestant wilderness myth - and that of the American pioneers, our most recent and accessible story of man being thrown back into nature. The paintings were to examine the spiritual value increasingly accorded to nature and the wilderness, and the mythology of the frontiersman that has become bound up with it.
As the fourteen images took shape, I found that they were becoming more and more bleak and the idea of some kind of apocalyptic version of our future return to a wilderness lifestyle was becoming central. On considering that “… in the late twentieth century and early twenty first century we have had the opportunity, previously enjoyed only by means of theology and fiction to see after the end of our civilisation - to see in a strange prospective retrospect what the end of the world would actually look like: it would look like a Nazi death camp, or an atomic explosion, or an ecological or urban wasteland” (After the End James Berger), it seemed to me, as it did to Ted Kaczynski that a return to the wilderness must involve some sort of unravelling.
Enthused by Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, I began to see the series as a thought and feeling experiment – bleak and exhilarating… suggesting the terror when encountering something horrific, and the concurrent brief feeling of appreciation for what we take for granted on a daily basis. As in ‘The Road’, and as a new father, I found myself increasingly aware of an underlying fear as to whether I would be capable of protecting my children should anything threaten them or the society we lived in that protected us from random violence and deprivation.
I wanted to explore this fear and possible inadequacy in the face of hardship by moving the viewer round the paintings like a ‘camera eye’ around the transgressive beauty in the centre… moving around as if with a hand held camera – the first person perspective used to heighten suspense and the meditative arena of the stations as a frightening short film.
