Exhibition open ~ Thursday 20th Feb - Tuesday 25th Feb 2025 ~ 11am - 4pm daily Opening event ~ Wednesday 19th Feb ~ 6pm - 8pm
Address: Centre for Recent Drawing, 2-4 Highbury Station Rd, London N1 1SB
“If you spend the night at the peak of Cadair Idris, the famed mountain seat of the astronomer-giant of ancient Welsh lore, you will return either a poet, or mad. ”
In 2024 three pseudo-scientific researchers - Layan Harman, Teän Roberts and Skye Turner - undertook to measure this folkloric phenomenon- launching an expedition into unknown territory, testing the fragile boundary between the states of madness and poetics.
Their apparatuses were not robust scientific tools but rickety, homespun divinatory devices, peering unreliably into another realm.
Their fragmentary results evoked syphoned lichen liquids, makeshift weather stations, meteorological lures, dubious PPE, and a burning marsh-light UFO.
Desiring to be misled, revelling in their non-understanding, they recorded their own vanishing.
None of them returned.
The remnants of their lost expedition will be shown in this exhibition, along with a published journal of their last writings, and a performance of their final days and hours.
What to expect: photography…
What to expect: zine…
Unverified Personal Gnosis 72 Page Colour Zine:
We have also made a zine containing the remnants of this lost expedition, along with their last writings which describe their final days and hours. Order link below.
What to expect: film…
About the Artists…
Skye Turner, Teän Roberts and Layan Harman met on the Contemporary Art Practice MA at London’s Royal College of Art in 2022. Drawn together by shared artistic concerns, their first collaboration was an interactive beehive installation for Tate Modern’s Tate Lates in 2023, followed by a joint residency to Cyprus College of Art later that year, and another residency at Mawddach Residency in Eryri national park, Wales, in 2024 - where they created the work for Unverified Personal Gnosis.
Skye Turner is an artist and metalworker who uses mixed media, ceremony, and absurd fiction to explore both collective and personal gnosis. Her sculptures, films, performances and paintings carry a hieroglyphic and ornamental sensibility, constructing narratives through puppets, industrial refuse, shed animal parts, and costume. These elements converge to create a world dense with symbolic tension. Turner is drawn to the interlocking realms of UFOs, visions, horror, and hermeticism, finding resonance in the occupational folklore of industrial workshops. Within these spaces of labor and craft, she unearths themes of bodily liberation, spiritual yearning, and the latent presence of possessive magic. Psychedelia, lycanthropy, and the bestial thread through her work, alongside practical interests in generative modes of collaborative practice. She investigates temporal dislocation, chronic illness, and the mythos of wellness, reframing archetypes of the trickster and the wound. Her practice embraces the tension between transformation and decay, animating objects and narratives that challenge linear time and fixed identity.
Teän Roberts works in photography, writing, moving image and sculpture. Between this lattice of elements, stories brew and coagulate: new myths of deep futures and far pasts. This work probes edge-lands, portals, thresholds, membranes, and explores contrasts between celestial, cerebral, illusory airiness and grounded, boggy, physical, terrestriality. Roberts’s work begins with a place. They find places where the veil to the imaginary feels thin and they can play with the images that leak through. They follow these threads down different pathways with words, fabric, fibres, paints and their own body to uncover artefacts from/for the other dimension that they are attempting to reach - clues to the story that is trying to form. Then - when the light is right - the act of photographing or filming can open up a portal between these worlds. These acts become ritualised for Roberts: working with/in the transcendent magic of natural light they can slip through this portal and submerge entirely into a visionary alternate reality - to experience what it feels like to exist in another paradigm. When they return through the portal, they bring part of that experience back with them, a body memory infused with mystery, that they can call upon when needed. These myth-drenched memories orientate Roberts towards ways of being that resist and contradict our constrictive earthling conditioning. The resulting images become relics and records of this experience, dragged back from other realms to help map a more hopeful path.
Layan Harman feels that massive issues like climate breakdown or the brutality of capitalist exploitation are best addressed by art on local, specific terms. He therefore looks for specific points of difficulty or negotiation between human and more-than-human worlds, such as fragments of ancient woodland, beekeeping practices, or a space telescope, from which to tease out these much wider, underlying concerns. Harman conducts his research in close listening with his environment, often responding to the place he makes work in, traces of the past extant in the landscape, or his own cultural heritage and context, always looking to be rooted, emplaced. Harman creates ritual equipment, sites of transformation, or remnants of speculative cultural practices that flow from these negotiations. He aims to speak from a place of timelessness, creating work that could be ancient yet points towards a transformed future. He always leave room for the mystery- that which is fragmented, hidden, or unknowable. Much of his work stems from recognising and valuing the ungraspable nature of the earth’s ecological systems, the distant past, or the cosmos, as a counterpoint to Western culture’s implicit belief that something must be understood in order to have worth.
This exhibition was created with huge thanks to Mawddach Residency - www.mawddachresidency.com - and Centre for Recent Drawing - www.c4rd.org.uk - who made this work possible.