REWRITE REALITY exhibition artist | Low Winter Sun
Narrative theorists of the self argue that our nature is determined by the stories we tell about ourselves, whether they’re focused on our bodies, our relationships or our achievements. In many ways we are not free to choose the content of our lives, just as the words and images on the pages of a book, and the order of the pages, constrain our engagement with the text. The act of book-carving, though, reveals how different narratives can be forged from the same ordered set of words and images, and suggest, analogously, how our lives and our very selves can be narrated in distinct ways. We can focus, for example, on the life of the body, our health and perhaps how religion can sustain us.
In ‘Blood’ the book pulses with corpuscles, both corporeal and divine (top left: the blood of Christ circulates around the head of William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulatory system). Our idyllic lives in ‘The Suburbs’ — those of romance, and house and garden — are threatened by the flea-driven Plague (parallels of course with today’s pandemic). Lastly, mortality looms large in ‘Age’. Rembrandt’s consummate meditation on aging — his series of self-portraits — peeps through the pillars and naves of our imagined mausoleum. The project is ongoing and carving will reveal more stories hidden within The Body in Question, as there are identities hidden within us — the liberating act of book-carving revealing to us such possibilities.
Dr Dan O’Brien and Lucy Russell are the principal members of the artist collective Low Winter Sun. Dan is a Reader in philosophy at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and a visiting professor of philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy. He is the author and editor of over ten books, and his Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (Polity) has been translated into Korean, Arabic and Portuguese. He works mainly on the history of philosophy and epistemology, but has also published on Caravaggio and cubism. Lucy is a psychiatric liaison nurse. Their joint art projects focus on the intersection between philosophy and mental health. Most recent is a series of found objects and assemblages that chart the emotional journey of covid-isolation — feelings of despair, alienation, and love projected onto objects gathered on late night expeditions into deserted city streets.
