Lindsay Seers

The truth was always there | The Collection, Lincoln

23 September - January 2007

The Collection, Lincoln

Materials: DVD installation with 2 projections and 5.1 surround sound.

Excerpt from: Richard Grayson text in Smart Paper ‘Swallowing Black Maria’.

"Seers takes this logic of projection further. With Bill and the other dummies her recording function is externalised and she expands this into an undertaking to turn herself into a projector. This development is hinted at in the drawing of her body where the cone of what is visible seemingly radiates from her head. The image inexorably recalls earlier ideas of sight where the ancients were uncertain of the direction of vision: whether it radiated from the eye — the eye beam, an idea manifested in the idea of Medusas petrifying gaze — or whether, as Alhazen argued in the 11th century, light operated as a stimulus on the eye.

We learn about Seers interest in pre-scientific modelling of the world and the universe and its occult, animating forces. It was a body of enquiry and research that links seamlessly with the body of knowledge that has allowed the development of photography, with its focus on light: the immaterial transforming material into new substances and forms. Newton famously combined both spheres of investigation, the search for the philosopher’s stone — a sort of universal cure that healed metals of its impurities — for instance, paralleling his work on light and optics, mathematics and gravity. The area of Lincolnshire where Seers was regretfully relocated is saturated with the history of Alchemy, linked to Robert Grosseteste, Dr John Dee, Isaac Newton and Robert Fludd. We are told that Seers may have been a member of the Rosicrucian Order herself, as the foundation text A Chymical Wedding, is found in her room. Alchemy itself talks of the search for a lost unity, and investigation that seeks links in a world where that which lies below mirrors that above, and the “everlasting emphasis on macrocosm and microcosm that lies at the heart of occult systems” (Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment). It seems fitting that it should become the means by which Seers seeks to rearticulate models of a lost unity. In a haunting image Seers is seen squatting in a darkening field with beams shooting out of the apparatus on her head projecting a beautiful crystalline tree of light: a manifestation of the alchemist’s tree of life that sought to explicate and unite the realms of the material and the ineffable."

Illustrated gallery information sheet:

The Truth Was Always There.pdf (filesize 2.5MB)