Underland: A Deep Time Journey

We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint – and so is place. Things that should have s

Traversing those dunes on foot was like trudging through a windless desert on a lightless planet.

Follow a path through fields, past a hill to the east that is marked by a line of nine round burial barrows, nubbing the land like the bones of a spine.

Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives).

‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ a ‘downwards violence’.

The prints will survive for more than 35,000 years. Signs of what? Of joy? Of warning? Of art? Of life in the darkness?

The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.

She lives on water drunk with cupped hands from a sacred river, and on foraged wild berries and fruits. The mantras, the solitude and the darkness bring perceptions that are new to her, and she experiences a profound change in her vision. When at last she completes her retreat she feels vast as the skies, old as the mountains, formless as starlight

utter matter.

The underland is vital to the material structures of contemporary existence, as well as to our memories, myths and metaphors.