The installation, ‘Hinterlands’, made in collaboration with Jim Harold, comprises two related elements: a wall painting with vinyl text; and four unframed photographic digital prints arranged on adjacent walls. The installation was made specifically for the exhibition, ‘Between Worlds’: East-West Contemporary Art & Research, in the University Gallery, Renmin University of China, Beijing from 20-25 April 2015. The exhibition included contributions from 5 contemporary artists from China, along with 5 from Europe.
The wall texts for our collaborative installation are taken from a mixture of diary notes and descriptions of photographic images made by the artists, Brind & Harold, over a number of years whilst on research journeys. The texts are not chronologically ordered but, instead, are intended to be read as a series of text-images. Through typographic layout and proximity, the texts become interrelated whilst not being the direct traces of a linear journey or journeys. Rather, they tell of the small moments of travel and experience (un-photographable in some cases) that act as the truer registers of a journey; whether that journey is outwardly bound or inwardly focused. As a result the work seeks to allow these events and the phrases used to account for them to become liminal spaces - thresholds or hinterlands - through which the viewer's own imagination may engage with the artists’.
The photographs of desert space, details of the desert floor taken in the Egyptian a Desert, are similarly intended as the traces of real events and locations, while providing ambiguous spaces of reading and meaning.