A Space In Between
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. Now― James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the whitewashed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse was it?
No the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse too.
VIRGINIA WOOLF1
Alongside my encounters with Zac Langdon-Pole’s recent work—investigations into histories, materials, people, processes and the workings of perception—is a distant, more shadowy memory of a pleasant feeling, accompanied by other feelings, more subterranean . . . and distinctly more unsettling. It is the recollection of the effect of reading Virginia Woolf’s (1927); her book about the Ramsay family, whose long-delayed journey to the lighthouse forms its narrative framework. As the reader becomes aware of the book’s themes, in particular the self’s fragile existence in time, and as its protagonists enter into idiosyncrasies of perception and the manifestation of metaphoric stirs dissonant emotions in the reader—at once intensely inquisitive and sensory, but also unsure, agitated, and a little lost.
