Avebury Imaginary
Excerpt from Hector Campbell’s exhibition essay for I’m Here But I’m Not A Cat, a group show at SET Kensington, September 2023
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The artist duo Daniel & Clara have maintained a collaborative practice for over a decade and present, in their own words, as “one artist split into two human forms”. Their series of short videos, On The Island, gained attention during the pandemic due to being originally shared and disseminated via Instagram. The videos, a response to both the physical lockdown limitations and their associated psychological consequences, saw the pair utilising their daily allotted hour of exercise to explore the surroundings of their new home on Mersea Island in Essex. We witnessed them commune with the local landscape; looking, listening, lying. The British countryside serves not only as an extension of their studio, where the duo walk and talk to generate ideas, but as more of a muse, a third co-collaborator in their practice even. This enduring love affair with England’s green and pleasant lands began when they returned to the UK for a short screening tour in 2017, having previously spent an extended period of time living in Portugal. The tour ended in Avebury, Wiltshire, a small village entirely encompassed within one of Europe’s largest stone circles, a place replete with menhirs and monoliths, all overlooked by Silbury Hill, an artificial neolithic mound of unknown origin or intention.
The pair describe this serendipitous encounter with the mythic stones as ‘life-changing’, the visit forming the culminating climax of their feature-length moving image work Notes From A Journey, and initiating their eventual move back to the UK. Unsurprisingly, Daniel & Clara are not the first artists to be awe-inspired by Avebury. Paul Nash returned to the stones as a subject matter in a number of paintings and photographs, most notably 1935’s ‘Equivalent for the Megaliths’ which currently resides in Tate Britain. Derek Jarman too turned his camera onto the many monoliths in 1971 for his orange-hued film A Journey to Avebury, which can be viewed at Paris’ Pompidou Centre. Avebury Imaginary, the duo’s own addition to the site’s artistic lineage, includes a moving image work documenting their return to the village in 2019; photographs documenting the stones’ stasis across their three visits; and a scale model constructed entirely from memory. A linear timeline collapses as the past and present merge. Memory and reality are investigated, their importance and veracity called into question. Enduringly analogue, with vintage video cameras and polaroid photography, the duo document themselves documenting Avebury, seeking to capture the moment as their memories, and mythologising, of the original encounter deepens.
Hector Campbell is an art historian, writer and curator based in South London, and director of Soup Gallery.