reviews > Penzance, Cornwall, UK

Anna Keleher
Anna Keleher

10/19/11 4:13 PM

For a biblical forty days and forty nights, Anna Keleher and her collaborator Claire Coté gave up their own dreamtime to wonder about the visions of the verdant Irish landscape sheltering them in Marble Caves Geopark. Does the land dream through us, they asked, eschewing the more obvious question of whether the land dreams at all. Artists from the Surrealists on have experimented with the effects of site on human sleep, but Keleher and Coté accomplish a critical twist by imbuing the land itself with the ability to dream, and by suggesting that we might impact it. The drawings they’ve produced to illustrate these earthy dreams would perhaps be more dreamlike if the artists had devised a means of collaborating not just with one another but with the trees and foliage and dirt, as they come close to doing in a blog image of a farmer spinning twine from hay still attached to the ground.

—Lori Waxman