Avebury Imaginary

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Works from the Avebury Imaginary project have been exhibited at SET Kensington, London (2023), By Art Matters, Hangzhou, China (2021), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Grand Palais Paris & HKW Berlin (2020), Festival Ecrã, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2019), Slow Film Festival, UK (2019), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019).

An ongoing body of work started in 2017 when Daniel & Clara first encountered the prehistoric monuments of Avebury in Wiltshire, a catalytic moment that initiated a new phase in their life and work – a move from Portugal to the UK and a new focus on the British countryside as a subject.

The works of the Avebury Imaginary project deal with our relationship to place – thinking back to how our ancestors related to their environment, this project explores how we humans grapple with our place in the universe through art making and the process of creating meaning in our lives.

Through moving image, mail art, photographs, sculpture and performance, the works investigate the complex layers that inform how we navigate reality – how we experience time, the process of remembering and how images mediate our experiences.

Avebury Complex

Foam, paint, paper, air dry clay, plaster, wooden table, drawings and working materials, electric light and shade, 2023


A scale model of Avebury stone circle and Silbury Hill made entirely from memory. Without looking at any references, photographs or maps, Daniel & Clara mentally retraced the steps of their previous visits (in 2017, '19 and '21) to create a representation of the place in 3D. Using the techniques of railway model makers and table top gamers, there is a sense of the hobbyist about this piece, personal obsession expressed through creative activity.

The series of ancient monuments in this area are often referred to as the Avebury complex – in this work Daniel & Clara explore the double meaning of 'complex' as being both a related group of ancient sites but also in the psychoanalytical sense: “Complexes are common features of the psychic landscape, … a related group of repressed or partly repressed emotionally significant ideas which cause psychic conflict, leading to abnormal mental states or behaviour.”

A stone is a stone is a stone

digital c-type print, 62.8 x 42.9cm (framed), 2023

Two moments in time folded into one as a photograph of a standing stone taken on Daniel & Clara's first visit to Avebury in 2017 is held in front of the same stone on a return visit 4 years later.

The title refers to Gertrude Stein's famous line 'a rose is a rose is a rose' of which she said that in Homer or Chaucer's time 'the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.' A statement which succinctly exposes the modern chasm between words and things, and as Daniel & Clara point to here in this piece, the complex relationship of images to lived reality.

Red Letter #3, Avebury

pen and inkjet on 80gsm red paper, c-type black and white photograph, metal paperclip, 29.7 x 21 cm, 2022

The Red Letters are a series of 12 letters printed on red paper, each accompanied by a black & white photograph taken on a 1947 Goldy box camera.

The letters tell the stories of Daniel & Clara’s visits to various sites in the British countryside, each text weaving their inner and outer experiences of place into phenomenological artefacts where the real and imagined exist as one.

The third letter in this series recounts an experience of visiting Avebury.

Revisiting

single channel video, mini-DV, 2019, 15 mins

Document and dream exist as one in a visionary travelogue of a journey to Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire. The artists return to the site of an earlier experience in order to look again at a place of personal significance. Revisiting presents an experience mediated by technology and expresses the complex layers that inform how we navigate reality and create meaning from our experiences.

Avebury Stones

polaroid photographs, 2019

In 2019 after moving back to the UK from Portugal Daniel & Clara returned to Avebury, a desire to visit again this place that had been the catalyst for their return to England – they carried with them a polaroid camera and two packs of expired film fortuitously found in a second hand shop moments before leaving. As they wandered the stones they photographed them, not even knowing if this 20 year old film would produce an image. What emerged were 8 eerie impressions of the monoliths, washed in a deep green light with luminous ghosts floating around the sarsens.

Avebury Forms

polaroid photographs, 2019

From the same expired film packs which produced the Avebury Stones polaroids, 3 sheets came out blank, the camera's rollers failing to activate the dyes. Frustrated with the failed exposures, Daniel & Clara pressed their thumbs against the pouch which contains the secret chemical tincture, releasing it onto the square brown background. Yellow formations started to emerge, growing like a lichen seen in time-lapse, and shaping the creation of these images.