LANDSCAPES OF OUR BEING

 This work explores the innately complex and unifying influence of landscape on the human experience. Inspired by the ancient monuments which have shaped the backdrop of his formative years, Matthew Dennis sees this work as a delayed response to the enforced seclusion at his childhood home on Dartmoor, during the 2020 lockdowns.

Nine Maidens stone circle, in Belstone*, is the genesis for this series. A Bronze Age kistvaen** charged with local folklore, Matthew draws upon both its reverence for the natural world and its connection to those who came before us. This ritual monument, embedded within the landscape, demonstrates how humans have forever felt the need to embody the divine into the tangible and earth-bound.

St Michael’s and St Mary’s ley lines interweave around this enigmatic spot – an intersection of the masculine and feminine – inviting us to exist simply as beings, experiencing the freedom of oblivion within this wild and isolated landscape.

From this starting point, Matthew reaches further across Dartmoor, feeling for connections to the pulse of beings long past, as well as human reflections within the sculptural features of these mystic barren moors.

The kistvaens of Dartmoor are a poignant signifier of our cyclical nature ~ we do not disappear, but return back to the earth to be reborn in some form. Some beings may be remembered by stones, others by an upturned tree that still reaches upwards towards the divine. Ultimately, this exhibition encourages the viewer to experience and rediscover ancient sites, not as tourist attractions, but as spiritual conduits to the earth, ancestors and gods.

Matthew hopes that by underscoring the connection he has to his native landscape, we will be prompted to tune in to our own.

* Mythical memory suggests that the name Belstone, could be a corruption of the name of the Middle Eastern Sun God Baal, of which Nine Maidens may have been a place of worship for the Phoenicians. Fanciful and apocryphal though this might well be, it serves to highlight the interconnectedness between peoples, cultures + rituals.

**Dartmoor kistvaens are burial tombs - cists - from the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. There are 180 known cists on Dartmoor, although there are possibly a hundred more dotted around the landscape, embraced beneath unexplored cairns. They are often found in the centre of a cairn circle and appear to be positioned so that the interred are facing the sun.