SUBLIME COGNITION: SCIENCE FICTION & METAPHYSICS

The London Science Fiction Research Community's theme for 2018 was 'Sublime Cognition: Science Fiction & Metaphysics'. The year's reading list, reading group and events programme examined the representations of the spiritual, supernatural and mythical in SF. 

I wanted to think about what elements of our world and its environment could have inspired or influenced our collective understanding of spirituality and magic; how the earthly shapes the abstract. For the purposes of this piece I focused on the binaries and diurnal rhythms of the natural world - recurring seasonal changes, life and death, night and day, cold and hot, light and dark - carrying the theme of duality from the artwork through to the layout design, reversing the colour palette to represent the separate days of the 2 day conference.

For the artwork I looked at religious artefacts, taking inspiration from the extensive collection of objects at the Museo de Frederic Mares and their archival presentation, and decided to work with the shape of a reliquary. I collaborated with carpenter Morris Wild to construct a bespoke artefact, painting the designs on its surface. 

In photographing the reliquary, I wanted to frame it so that the size and scale of the object was unclear, making it seem as though this object had risen from or appeared into the environment from unknown origins.