Prima Materia
Martha’s photographs document the recently erupted Fagradalsfjall volcano as a new landscape is born. Rather than narrating the volcano’s eruption in its red-hot fury, these dramatic photographs describe the lava as it sets, its rage waning, calming, eventually sleeping. The forceful energy of the mountain’s determination remains plainly evident here in the visceral, swirling, solidified shapes; new texture and topography fixed in perpetuity whilst forever recalling the violence of its making. 

The small sculptural objects are foraged from the real landscape. Small interventions as well as re-naming, directs the attention to meanings that the environment and unique geology evoke. 

Kara’s installational pieces speak directly about the impact that the raw substance of the Icelandic geology has upon the observer – the temporality of the ancient rock and the method of its making clearly evident everywhere in the Icelandic landscape; its process of formation – the power of its movement then its permanence as it sets. 

 Fracture: Tongue/Groove

This durational and performative piece continues to change throughout the exhibition from the point at which the first piece of material is laid. Once completed, the work will be left to dry and crack, unpredictably, until the closing of the exhibition. 

The impetus for the piece is the experience of seeing first-hand the recently formed lava tongue from the Icelandic Fagradalsfjall mountain. The lava, though solidified appears live – hot, smoking, smelling of gases, creaking. Cracks and fissures appear everywhere in the black basalt as it cools. Shapes are created then shift and butt up against each other as the pressure builds. The effect is dramatic, forbidding and exciting.

I wanted use my hands to make an artwork that, rather than replicating the lava, used processes equivalent to the magma is it spews, solidifies, then cools: pouring, folding, layering, rolling, cracking. 

This is my Covid piece. The cracks and fault lines, the newly transformed profile of the landscape found parallels for me in the way the world has changed since the beginning of the pandemic – the sense of there being a ‘before and after’; displaced continuity with the past, with relationships, broken or fractured. The fearfulness that comes with the realisation that unpredictable change can disrupt our lives at any moment. 

The Prima Materia, or raw material is, in alchemical terms, the dark primordial substance from which all material world emerges. In geological (and enlightenment) terms, this is far from the objective truth, but Carl Jung, equates this alchemical process, metaphorically, with the hidden darkness of the psyche, and this remains universal and continual. 

'The Opus (work) of alchemy, viewed through this interpretation, becomes a symbolic account of the fundamental process the human psyche undergoes as it re-orients its value system and creates meaning out of chaos’. 

In his Alchemy and Psychology 1944, Carl Jung explains his theory of individuation:

'we descend back into the manipulable prima materia and proceed ‘through a process of spiritual purification that must unite seemingly irreconcilable opposites (the coniunctio) to achieve new levels of consciousness’.

The alchemists, Jung says, ‘discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness…. the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends.”