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 In his artistic practice Christopher Collier seeks to work through an assorted range of media but underpinning the variety of pieces that he produces is an essentially unified approach.
Working through site-specific installation, photography, sound and other media he attempts to adopt a diverse and contemporary approach to the history, traditions and psychological geography of specific locations.
He deals with these concepts and the way in which they relate to the contemporary situations, frequently in marginalised and rural contexts. Christopher seeks to utilise artistic practice as a vehicle for the re-engagement with heritage: a reinterpretation of this subject matter through a contemporary context and yet also an act of preservation.
He seeks, through contemporary analysis, to breathe new creative life into many of the traditions that he addresses in order to shield them against extinction beneath the casual apathy of modern mass culture. He often seeks to subvert the very language and iconography of this mass culture into the actual physical and theoretical tool of preservation itself.
His work frequently adopts the position that the artist’s primary role must be to foster mistrust in reality, seeking to make work that can cut through mundane experience in order to captivate and momentarily jar the viewer into a fresh assessment of their situation.
Hand in hand with this preservation and reinvigoration traditional subject matter goes the acknowledgment that rural space is critically important, indeed essential to presenting a true picture of the contemporary condition. |
 The work takes the form of a collection of objects alluding to an imagined paradisal garden constructed in the window space of a disused shop. The piece seeks to utilise the visual language of retail display: the iconography of the spectacle – as defined by the Situationists, and marry it to the complex allegorical terminology of Symbolist painting and Romantic poetry and flower codes.
The work displays a row of rose trees (white, yellow and pink – representing the innocent familial, friendship and passionate aspects of love) shedding petals in a trail leading towards a ladder. The rose bushes are interspersed with golden apples processing towards the ladder and up into space. In the corner a discarded lily interjects like a deus ex machina whilst the window is emblazoned with gold vinyl lettering spelling out the line from Blake: “who countest the steps to the sun.”
The idea behind the work is an allegorical examination of the alienating influence of contemporary urban-living. Taking the position of the associative power of symbols, as found in myth and the subconscious, the piece examines the idea that for better or worse the last one hundred years has seen the transition from the vast majority of people living in rural areas to the vast majority now living in cities and towns. This micro-Eden, an island within the surrounding urban space, forms an allegory for this idealised ‘golden-age’ of pastoral living, a garden of life and love, that finds expression within the folklore of all cultures. The title ‘Insula Avalonsis’ translates as ‘Isle of Avalon’ and derives from the paradise island in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae which in turn name derives from the Welsh word afall (modern Welsh afal) meaning ‘apple’. The isle of apples or garden of apples, golden apples, is a common motive for paradise in many cultures, from Hercules and the garden of Hesperides in Greek myth, through Norse and Celtic mythology to Jack and the Beanstalk and the golden eggs and not forgetting Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. The archetype of a paradise garden containing magical golden fruit, often guarded by a fearsome serpent or giant that is challenged by mortal assailants can be seen as an analogy for our alienation from a past more attuned to the natural world. The garden is always reserved for immortals, it is a place off-limits to humankind, a paradise lost, a boundary that must be challenged. What all of these stories from Adam and Eve to Jack and the Beanstalk represent is a challenge to this tyrannical structure that forbids us natural enjoyment. It must belie a deeply felt psychological alienation that a culture must produce such myths to deal with the trauma of being cut off from its own nature.
What this installation represents, rather than a literal, decodable symbol is instead an associative tableux, as found in a myth or a dream: a scattering of symbols and meanings than amalgamate such stories into a unified archetype. A trinty of rose trees sheding love, golden apples ascending a ladder - climbing the steps of the sun, the disgarded lily combine with tales of Jack's Beanstalk, Eden and Avalon to evoke a feeling or emotional reaction rather than a rational understanding. Much like shop windows conspires to do. It is a challenge to our alienation, subverting the very iconography of the spectacle to our own use, a taking back of the golden apples. The lyric spelt out across the widow “who countest the steps to the sun” is a line from the William Blake poem Sunflower that talks about the aspiration to be reunited with this blissful golden age, this paradise lost, and to reclaim a birthright to live within nature not alienated from it by the machinery of contemporary capitalism. |
