Space & Time Scars

‘Physical places are vital sources of metaphors for our social constructions of reality…Our perception of reality is defined by metaphor’.
Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred.

The meaning of place is created by stories, myth, rituals, history and in naming. Ruins are places of incomplete presence, allowing the individual the ability to engage and to some extent, complete the place with their own imaginings. It has been widely discussed that we have become distant from nature and in todays technological age its serves more as an abstraction. To over compensate we often romantise nature and objectify it, such a reaction is born out of a deep anxiety and guilt.

Sites like Rievaulx and Fountains have a deep rooted history, tied to the land, ritual, solitude. Yet they clearly are not romantic – these are places of turbulance, places of rupture where people have been physically removed from the land. ‘Suppression of the Monasteries’ or ‘Dissolution of the Monastries’ was the formal process between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII removed the monastic communities and confiscated property. These scars hold heavy ressonace and metophor as today the sites are ruins and on one hand devoid of life, yet clearly in this state of ruin something still exists…