inbetweenandunderneath brings together the work of four artists, three of whom are currently research students at the London Institute. Their work is reminiscent of archaeological investigation. Specific locations are explored as sites where human experience is subsumed or erased either by accident or design.

Following the artists' statements is an essay by Jason Wright.

The action of The Visit, a play written by Friedrich Durrenmatt, takes place in a small town “somewhere in Central Europe”. An elderly lady returns to her hometown after an absence of many years. It has turned into a flourishing suburbia. The most striking sign of prosperity is that everyone is wearing yellow shoes.

Re-visited, my grandparents’ town, Campu-lung, seems the same, yet a sense of absurdity slowly pervades you. A whole system of yellow pipes and boxes has invaded the calm appearance of the old streets, moving with its own logic through the town: an over-ground gas system built overnight meant to bring the desired warmth and happiness into people’s houses. Following this ‘disease’ most of the public objects in Campu-lung (benches, rubbish bins, newspaper kiosks) had also been painted yellow.

The ‘Gas Pipes’ photographs are part of a visual research project about memory & identity in post-communist Romania. In 1980s, a large area from the centre of Bucharest was erased by the totalitarian communist regime in order to build what is now called “The Parliament Palace”. The images from Bucharest show the border between the destroyed area of the city and the remaining streets and houses.

These works are based on an inter-play between real and constructed images. The distinction between the two is purposely blurred; what is real, what is not, and anyway what is reality in Romania?

Clare Stent : Delta

I began to document river estuaries around Britain about six years ago. I am interested in the historical and sociological importance of estuaries; as providers of food, sheltered waters for shipping, their significance in the industrial structure of the country and increasingly as places for relaxation.

I am intrigued by the sense of freedom in estuaries with the possibility of distant journeys, where the river looks toward the international, extending to a less parochial view. I concentrate in particular the area where the estuary is neither the sea nor the river, where the flux seems most apparent, an area of liminality.

John Tran : Utopia

In 1854 American gunboat diplomacy forced an isolated feudal Japan into a world of industry, free markets, and a hierarchy of races based on prevailing theories of social Darwinism. Japan, however, defied this hierarchy by rapidly developing the infrastructure and technology of the western powers for itself.

This series of work explores the promise of enlightenment culture that the western model of modernity offered to Japan and, at the same time, the sentimentality behind western observers’ view of turn of the century Japan as an Eastern fairyland.

Minos Zarifopoulos : Souvenir

With every glance at the city of Athens, one is treated to a multi-layered visual and social experience. From ancient Classicism to Byzantine and post-war phenomena, this layering is always visible in the graphics and the architecture shaping the surface of the capital. Traces of old houses form part of modern buildings and ancient ruins are displayed in half excavated squares. Due to historical changes, random human activity and the speed of urban expansion to accommodate a vast internal and external migrant population, a new complex — but vivid — environment has been formed. A shot from the top view of the city intends to be a description of reality and, according to Walter Benjamin, derives from and is part of this reality.

The shot can be cruel, true, interesting, informative, repulsive, objective and/or a testimony of the interaction between people and space. In the case of Athens, people personalise the communal space of the city, an act that reshapes the facade of the city and produces a distinctive visual identity. The observer is often a visitor and, as such, takes along souvenirs to remember. The box — in the shape of an old type of brick — can be the souvenir of the sense of a city’s identity that balances between the established tourist’s image and the contemporary multiethnic reality. You are more than welcome to take a souvenir with you.

In my role as a psychotherapist I will look at images in this exhibition from a Jungian standpoint, discussing how the works illustrate themes of liminality, longing, and relationship; the relationship between inner and outer and the collective and individual.

Jungian thought recognises a difference between sign and symbol, in that a sign offers us something known about something else that is also known, whereas a symbol offers the only way of expressing a particular experience. A symbol has a component to it that can not be known in any other way than the symbol embodies, that our relationship with the symbol conscious and unconscious engenders. The symbol then may be shared collectively or be personal. From this viewpoint a symbol, as Jung puts it, becomes reduced to a sign, to something known, as the meaning is “born out of it”.

The better the symbol can carry a multiplicity of potential meanings the better we can pour ourselves, conscious and unconscious, into it and experience something on the verge of our knowledge, on the edge of consciousness.

The images in the exhibition draw us simultaneously into the outer world; Japan, estuaries in Essex, post-communist Romania, or Athens, and into our inner world of memory, fantasy and imagination. These two realities collide within the image and begin to form relationship: the relationship between the consciousness and unconsciousness of both the artist and the viewer, and the collective context within which these experiences are set.

If we take Tran’s “Anticipating the Arrival of Commodore Perry” [shown above] as an example image, within it are conscious references to the history of image making; for instance the plaintive open hands of the male figure in the foreground and a resemblance to Seurat’s Sunday in the Park. On a personal level it reminds me of walks I have taken on Sundays in London parks. On a collective level the open handed gesture crosses cultures. I see in it a specific reference to a Christian image of Christ as gatherer of souls, as psychopomp: as a symbol for the liminal space between life and death. So here I begin to form a relationship with the image to wonder what the figures are doing at the time of the photograph and feel some nostalgia for my own experiences. I also experience memories and associations relating to of the gestures and body language of the figures in a personal and a cultural context. I am reminded of experiences of longing. It is not the meaning I ascribe to the image, but the use of this image to give temporary form to my experiences, which flow from the personal to the collective.

Tran investigates the use of nostalgia in Japanese photography and refers to that in this image. However there is a bitterness expressed in this image, which echoes in both a western and an eastern context. Issues which might involve a longed for rural idyll, the legacy of industrialisation and man’s domination of the earth, on one hand, and differing histories developed in isolation over long periods meeting in modern times.

Tran’s images eloquently express not only his personal experience and a particular and scholarly view of Japanese culture, but also something which encompasses my personal experience and a collective experience of, for instance, formal and informal events in verdant urban spaces on Sundays. We are drawn by this image to engage not only archetypally with urban industrial cultures at rest, and the experiences of longing therein, but to our own personal experiences and those of the artist concurrently. This is contained within the symbolic nature of the image, which given the containing material structure of the image allows us to oscillate between meaning and experience. Making the deepening of the experience more bearable and the meaning ascribed to containing it less necessary. The complex layers, both personal and collective, that Tran weaves through his work enables an experience of both the landscape of Japanese cities and the cultural context that they express. In juxtaposition with our own inner imaginative landscape this brings up the archetypal tensions experienced in diversity.

All four artists work in a similar way to enable the viewer to use the images symbolically to explore their experiences.

Stent in her images generates tensions between inner and outer space. There is a sense of longing in her pieces which I see as more directly related to the bridge between how we come into relationship with what we long for and how are we and the space are changed in the process. The works here are photographs of the Thames estuary at Tilbury, the Stour at Harwich and the Orwell at Felixstowe, all at the point where the river begins to become the sea. She also includes a contour map of the area photographed. This is a place of change from one environment to another, a place of liminality, a place between. She recognises this in a corporeal sense inviting us with the maps and images together to inhabit the landscape she describes. Through her choice of image she invites this as metaphor for the inner journey, the liminal space between our inner and outer life, the longing for an inner completeness, and the experience thereof. However these are places of historical and industrial flux: Tilbury, the opening mouth of London to the world, and Felixstowe and Harwich as major ports to the east. The images have a peaceful quality, whilst still containing the necessities of modern living such as power stations, docks, fences and reinforced banks. This echoes our modern experience for understanding our inner world’s relation to the outer, without the edifice of an external assumed myth to contain it.

Marinescu’s work, also maps and photographs, explores a more traumatic experience of liminality. The ‘border’, as she describes it, between the derelict heart of Bucharest and the remains of the old town is a stark broken place. This is a place between where there is no mournful longing for transition, but a bursting through, change imposed violently from the overwhelming other. As in the images of Campu Lung where the gas pipes are, in some way, invading, not only urban landscapes, houses and streets, but picturesque forests and woods. It is as if something is coming out of the land itself to overwhelm our attempts at relationship to it. In fact of course it is the reverse; it is the attempt to overcome the forces that threaten us, natural and man-made, which generates these seeming absurdities.

The desire to impose gas pipes upon the images of Bucharest seem an attempt to make meaning from a chaotic intrusive experience, to gain control over an experience of destructive change. As if one needs to identify with that which invades us before one can mediate the experience and through the meaning generated encompass it. This is the practical use of symbol to transform experience.

Zarifopoulos’ work addresses liminality directly he regards “beauty as an experiential situation in which we participate as spirit and matter” this is the core of the liminality. He also says “graphic creation functions as a bridge of communication between personal and communal space.” Here are the themes that I have been outlining. Illustrating how we use symbols between ourselves and our environment, consciously and unconsciously, as an expression of our human experience. He offers us images of Athens, some of which form simple abstract patterns, others which offer quasi-archaeological experiences giving us differing experiences of modern day Athens and the tensions within it. These images, for me, interweave history and the modern material world expressing something of the tension between living Athens and the romantic esteem in which the city is held as the foundation of our structures of political communication.

I have followed an entirely subjective path through these works and have looked at them as symbols in a Jungian context. I have explored something of the themes of liminality that I see explored in the pieces and the context in which these pieces sit together. I hope that I have made it more possible to approach these images as symbols and to develop your own relationship with this thought-provoking and moving work.

Jason Wright is the Chief Executive and Clinical Director of The CORE Trust working with addicted people in Central London. He also has a private practice in North London.