A Response to Trails of Uncertainty –
Mark Buckeridge and Vivienne Dick

by Tara McGinn

No road sign, no map, no linear narrative to a destination. No tracking, just track marks, and scraps of a journey already taken. Traces like HB pencil on tissue paper; vague muscle memory of the direction to take, with no intention of finding anything in particular. Isn’t getting lost the best way to learn the surroundings? Walking out past the known and further to territory that doesn’t beckon to be discovered yet invites travellers to mark their passage via the invisible images in their mind’s eye. Desire lines, mapped out in crushed grass, bouncing back and replenishing the un-walked spaces with soft indentations, like heavy furniture on carpet.

Glimpsed in the central film is a familiar landscape of brown muck, grey skies, and holes – the orifices to another plane where the faeries, gods or demons lived. Whether a field, a wall, or a church, these are openings into a past where filmmaker Vivienne Dick, captured as a young person, frolics amongst ancient stones. Suspended in mid-space, this film is a montage of cut scenes, looping in and out of varying points in time, carrying an amalgamated aesthetic and thematic tone of lo-fi summer holiday hauntings. The nondescript locations give a sense of time made malleable like different coloured clays stratified in the earth. Both artists’ styles collapse into this dredged film reel making me question if it’s the 1970s or the 2020s. It’s a mixtape of scuffed jumpers, steaming coffee, rippled beach sand, cartwheels, car trips, gatherings around a dinner table, ascents up hillsides, a caravan in a meadow, a dancing tarpaulin, a soft snoozing cat, a crowd of people shouting “Free Palestine,” library books with a temperature gauge, a shiny black dog on a warm orange floor – interspersed with hand-scrawled messages; maybe notes of the editing process or syntax from the film itself.

Buckeridge’s drawings – gathered mark makings – are also suspended within plexiglass, like handmade film slides, directly mirroring the attachment to lo-fi aesthetics in the camcorder collective work by writing directly onto the plastic fabric of the film. Roadrunner by The Modern Lovers playing in the background cuts off to a minimalist soundtrack over rocks, pools and mucky puddles that frequent in between. So many other moments are sucked away into the opposite ominous hole as one film ends and the other begins, over and over, a ludic loop of retracing steps.

The opening of a nameless cave performs a reverse camera obscura; a peeping pupil peering back as if resisting the original camera’s eye, staring boldly into the flattened, black darkness of the first archive within the rock. This is a refusal to cross the threshold and enter the unknown space, through the labia of the Sheela-na-gig, through the portal into the “other.” Traversing pagan spirituality and religious colonialism, the meaning of these lightless passages bends to our will in false attempts at understanding them, resulting in a one-sided conversation. Yet, they wield power in their inaccessibility, withholding the light to even enter them as a prevention of knowledge acquisition. The filmed stillness, though paradoxical on a moving medium such as film, is repeated as film stills, also present in the space, their flat, lightless forms rendering a material memory, framed and stoic under an artificial spotlight.

Does the cave know its identity has been refracted through the lens and made semi-permanent elsewhere on paper? I’m giving the cave agency; giving the work an embodied magical realism, adding to the ever-changing mythologies that surround the spaces in question. Could caves be naturally formed cinemas? Cinemas are also spaces for the unseen to occur behind the glamour of giant illuminations and marketed as if it is a transformational experience in our commercial studio age. The concrete fabrication of The Complex serves as a counterpoint to the quartz sandstone formation in Donegal from Precambrian times before any living thing existed. Illuminated solely by the natural ebbing light, the explainable act of refraction turns the outside world upside down, mediating reality itself. Tombs, passages, entrances, and spaces you’re not supposed to be in are adequate spots for a story to be projected onto, even if that story acts as a kind of suitcase to the truth of the space itself. Comparably, the dark inner sanctum of The Complex is a former banana ripening hangar– an artificial cavern of industrial heritage, where food was forced to transform from freshly picked to edible. This process, as if by magic, involved the false introduction of hormones into a closed environment, encouraging the fruit to grow old like a UNO reverse of Tír na nÓg, the mythical land of eternal youth – a continual womb so to speak.

The film abstracts linear storytelling, emblematic of the artists’ aligned desires for what would normally be discarded or not considered as contributing to a narrative. It returns to filmic materiality, where the hybridity of various moving images layers time within time, mimicking rock itself, branching together like veins in the greater, less temporary system of geological memory. The artists moved in tandem and mapped out their project as they went along, visiting places of significance such as the Hill of Uisneach together. They also travelled to other locations on separate occasions; sharing their experiences in person or through follow-up conversations. The editing process became the project’s nucleus, like exchanging precious video images as if they were collectable cards. Rendering similar responses strikes me as a symbiotic collaboration with ghost-like qualities; standing in the footsteps of someone else, especially given the age difference between the artists, is a poetic collapse, recreated in footage where multiple moments become enmeshed into a singular mirage.

This navigation of ideas was exploratory; carving out a space for vulnerability, giving generously and willingly to one another. The intimacy of making work together was the invisible map; activating the informal moments – the blind spots – is precisely what is shown to us. The singular projection of the cave occupies genuine physical space, relating to ideas of shelter, spaces for community, sharing and protection from the outside world, a perfect location to collaborate within. It is the underlying plot device in an unplottable work, the type of non-space to conspire and emerge together. Even virtual dialogue through email or messages passes through the other dark spaces that digital servers must occupy to function, stretching the metaphor further; the internet is the cave that facilitated this interaction at a distance. Artistic collaboration is cloaked in mythology that these artists did not attempt to dispel through obvious explanations or a timeline. “Trails of Uncertainty” encapsulates the events that aren’t revealed when two paths cross or deviate around one another, instead choosing to keep them secret. I had tried to find clues in the information and scrambled within my own limerence when Dick and Buckeridge were simply pointing to the sky (with a camera). I felt foolish, looking up and realising that I already knew where they had gone without having known it. Neither their process nor its results were intended to be deciphered but followed until you came back around again to where you started, the steps taken only evidenced in temporary memory and mud, the very places these two artists find themselves again now. 

Tara McGinn is the inaugural MLP x The Complex writer in residence.
Trails of Uncertainty – Mark Buckeridge and Vivienne Dick was exhibited at The Complex 18 May - 01 June 2024