PHOSPHENE

I met up with Stevie Cussons on a residency in Cornwall with Mayes Creative and The Royal Astronomical Society. We have made a number of collaborations of which this is one. The 16m film shots were captured many years ago in a cave system in Yorkshire and these were adopted as new source material to provoke print making responses from Stevie. These new images were subsequently processed into pliable moving textures and sequenced with the original footage, creating a journey narrative and taking the viewer deep into the labyrinthine earth and consequently the complexities of their personal responses to the act of watching — the text is from Irish mystic and contemporary of Yeats, George Russell.
Stevie —  “I have been walking the coast paths and have been draw to, and drawn, the many Neolithic structures which litter those linked, liminal landscapes. I am fascinated by the carved marks found on these sites. A recurrent suggestion is that these symbols, which include whorls, spirals, zig-zags etc, are phosphenes. These are designs 'seen' but originating inside the brain, rather than through the eye, and which are induced by shamanistic practices, meditation, sensory deprivation, psychotropic substances or other 'mind altering' experiences. Such designs are found throughout the world in cave and other early art. These images triggered a memory and I realised that I had in fact seen them myself, years ago, when caving, having switched off my lamp to experience the complete darkness. After a while, I would see these scintillating forms which I now know are termed 'Prisoner's Cinema'.