So, why Limbo?
It’s 700 years since the Divine Comedy was published (1321) - wiki link

It’s 700 years since Dante Alighieri died (also 1321) - wiki link

My fascination with Dante’s writings specifically about the space where he met the classical poets around the ‘Noble Castle’, situated in Limbo. A place of stasis, and calm but also of unending waiting with no relief - link to my blog post exploring ideas of the architecture of the Noble Castle. On a personal level, it’s that we were in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, which still haunts me and I still feel the physical effects of. I’d like to explore some more of the existential difficulties of the time in a much more poetic way, rather than just the flat depictions of Sheffield places I’m known for.

Which leads me to the conceit:
A conceit - what if instead of feeling like we're living in a bizarre and frightening unending stasis, a limbo, we 'actually' are in one, that we are in the first ring of Hell itself? What would that look like? What eerie shifts and subtle visual slippages would there be to suggest such in the world about us? How has Limbo been represented in the past and can I use that to inform on the current moment?

Though possibly a bit too dark for our specific times I'm using it as a way to vent and sublimate my frustrations about the world at large, in a way which is a lot more explorative emotionally than my Uncertain Spaces work of the past few years whilst obviously being heavily informed by it too.

In Dante's 'Inferno', Limbo is a place of stasis, obviously. There is no punishment or torment, just an unending waiting that must be endured.

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There are 3 forms to Limbo in Inferno -

1. The 'Limbo of the Fathers' - the place where those born before Christ, or those deemed heathen reside. Heathens and pagans are the people, when alive, that never heard the true word of God, as declared by Jesus, then voiced by the true followers of Christ.

2. The 'Limbo of the Infants' - the place for those who died before being baptised.

3. The third version is the place of waiting before being judged by the long tailed Minos. Once Minos has wrapped his tail rings around the plaintiff souls they are then cast to whichever ring of Hell that has been chosen.

This third form is the 'why' of this Limbo project. The choices available to us appear on a personal, local, national and international level seem to be unending stasis with no resolution or a drop to a state or level where things are worse. Much worse. 

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Throughout the pandemic I have been walking a very specific path here in Sheffield for most weeks since the beginning of the 1st lockdown. Walking predominantly at night or twilight the streets and buildings are lit in a half-light or shielded in shadow. Being industrial hinterland backstreets, there is an absence of people which has allowed me a place to process and contemplate as time progresses. The whole experience whilst routine has been highly charged and very disconcerting. Seeing the empty streets reflect back a strange haunting quality, heightened by the induced kenopsia of lockdown then strangely reflective of the weirdness that has emerged in late 2020 and most of 2021 where everything (city, people, institutions, politics, spaces, ideas all existing on multiple levels of interaction - personal, local, regional, national, global) appears familiar yet nothing is reliable or can be trusted as all kinds of situations are without stability, thus open to change and flux. There is a huge paranoic suspicion that no thing is as at appears.

What would it look like if Sheffield was a variant of the Noble Castle? What visual slippages would there be that something was off?
(I need to underline I don’t believe any of the above to be the case, I’m not entering a delusional phase. I’m needing a year of catharsis and want to make it a time of experimentation)

What is the end result?:
I’m thinking 30 pieces of work. Many may be drawings, may be paintings of various sizes like the ones like the previous show with you. With the odd video or 2. I’m hoping this will lead into more as I will want to pick up what I’m known for once again after this period but hopefully this period of reflection will be absorbed into the new work.

Below are video experiments that came about from my initial interest in Limbo back in 2021/2022.

Each individual video below will need to be un-muted and you may need to refresh the page to get all the videos to load properly. Listen to all of them at once or individually, obviously the choice is yours. There's no plan as such, however, I am interested in how the videos connect with each other to see if any patterns arise. The page is best viewed full size on a monitor screen. There may be issues viewing on a smaller smart phone screen.