The House of the Old Tree

Jonathan’s imagery was inspired by a series of found negatives of people, landscapes and animals from the early part of the last century developed in a pharmacy in Larne; and drawings of fossils discovered in the same area in the collection of the Ulster Museum. Both sources have acquired a strangeness with the passing of the years. Yet the timespan separating these people’s lives and our own is infinitesimal in the context of a 200 million-year-old fossil; rendering our day to day concerns petty. From this vantage point the intimacy of the images places ‘the small and the infinite hand in hand’*, regardless of time and place.
* David Lynch in conversation with Mark Cousins.

Text by Joy Gerard.