NEXUS(+)
NEXUS(+)
Spike Nexus(+)
The enchantment and confinement of the island....
The project sets out to explore the connections between the many Spike Islands scattered around the globe.
The project promotes the exchange of portable/touring art interventions, aiming eventually to visit each one of the known islands (listed below) and possibly others of the same name, yet to be located...
Spike Nexus(+)
Antony Lyons of Nova Creative Lab has strong connections with Cork Harbour (Ireland) - site of one Spike Island; he is currently based at/on the Bristol (England) Spike Island.
Nexus (+)
The global ‘family’ of Spike Islands
Spike Island, Cork Harbour, Ireland
Spike Island, Bristol, England
Spike Island, Halton Borough, Widnes, England
Spike Island, Botany Bay, Sholing Common, Southampton, England
Spike Island, New York State, USA
Spike Island (Mine), Pennsylvania, USA
Spike Island, Valdez-Cordova County, Alaska, USA
Spike Island, John Muir Country Park, Dunbar, Scotland
Spike Island, Andaman Islands, Indian Ocean
Contextual art explorations will involve creative re-mappings, focusing on some of the shared historical experiences of these islands - nearly all of which were sites of prisons or places of confinement. Remnant traces and objects from these times are recorded and used to amplify the echoes of the past, and the ripples of experiences - spectral traces - which still remain.
The resulting works will exhibit aspects of archaeology, cartography and landscape design, and will be be woven through with impressions and intuitive responses. Along with the rational, the approach is equally that of the poet and the dreamer. These islands-sites are then ‘entered’ as mental landscapes as well as real. They are, in a way, re-mapped.
the freedom of mapping...and maps of freedom...
“in the ancient Greek world, mapmaking was an activity linked to philosophy and the sciences. There was no social or political control over map-making, upon its diffusion and its use. Nobody fixes norms or criteria regarding maps: each map-maker was absolutely free to propose his own views about the shape of the world, his own calculations of its size, his own geometrical frame, his own selection of places”
mappings in the mind, christian jacob, 1999