House On The Borderland

Nooka Shepherd

7th November - 20th December

The House On The Borderland, a solo exhibition by Nooka Shepherd invites the viewer into a hall of mirrors. Works in paint and ceramic act as conduits of memory and points of go-between. As slippery as the landscapes of the artist’s childhood, they are invitations into the internal landscapes of another, to be traversed and discovered afresh through unknown eyes and mind. The body of work is a love song to the artist’s childhood, family and the peculiar landscape of their upbringing. A seething landscape of slippage points and things half-seen in bog-bred gloom, the body of work echoes the borderlessness between human bodies and cherished places, an imaginal world that curls snugly around our own, cupping ours in its glowing, wrinkled hand.

This cupped hand, this mill pond, this open mouth is the cooking pot into which you are invited - a bogland, a hinterland, a hedgerow.

“She wakes to find her husband’s heavy breath and sleeping body beside her. His left leg is stood by the door. Cut at the knee, but not bloodied, without blood, disembodied it stands in a patch of moonlight. She leaves the bed and the sleeping man and walks towards the part of him that should not be there. It walks away, and a conversation begins.

The leg leads and the woman follows. It travels the landing, reaching the stairs and begins its amputated descent. With each tread, the apparition elongates, by the time it has reached the foot of the stairs, he is a man. He is her husband. He is not her husband. He is asleep above her, in their bed that smells of warmth and sleep and sweat and he is stood before her, with the moonlight shining through his bloodless skin. For the first time, she will address him, challenging this veary* soonere**, wearing love as a guising mask. He does not reply, perhaps he cannot speak, but he smiles, beckons, leads her out, into the garden. And They are here. They have always been here. They may seem to have appeared, but like the Spring, which seems to arise fresh each year, is always latent within the soil it breathes life into, They are part of the fabric and at times we might perceive Them.

The house and the garden sit on the boundary and these are the denizens of the Borderland. They wish to meet her, she who straddles hedges and shorelines and states inbetween. She who has trained herself to be like Them, who has been drawn to this hedgerow house, this boundary marker ripe in the bog that is home to the hosts of the Living and the Dead.

The House On The Borderland has found its keeper, and the Other Family welcome her in.”

* Veary- Dorset dialect for fairy

**Soonere - Dorset dialect for ghost/phantom

Text by Robin Goodfellow