Darkness Visible

Darkness Visible is a collection of Simone Couto, Brazilian-American multimedia artist, of her 3-year engagement with volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. It contains images of the research journey, drawings, paintings, sculptures, poetry, and theoretical texts by Couto and others. "The project is about light, darkness, and what veers in between–the body as a rolling stone, about landscape and our physical and emotional relationship to it.1. Every journey through time and space gives us the opportunity to tune in to the surroundings and ourselves. So it was with the artist's discovery of Iceland, its landscape, its materials, and, ultimately, with the volcano Eyjafjallajökull. Departing from a personal place, the journey soon became the discovery of Anicca (or Anitya), one of the essential Buddhist doctrines that assert that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is transient, evanescent, and inconstant. All physical and mental events come into being and dissolve. Human life embodies this flux in the aging process, the cycle of repeated birth and death. Nothing lasts and everything decays, which is applicable to all beings and their environs, and landscape as well.2. All of our experiences are registered in both a physical and mental memory. When our body moves within a certain terrain, our brain registers the surroundings and our muscles memorize any encountered resistance or harmony. The physical and mental practices (Aikido and Zen) that the artist learned in order to do the work were ultimately combined forces through the path of reciprocity between body and space.The discovery of these concepts and the possibility of finding living evidence in nature, especially in the magical volcanic landscape of Eyjafjallajökull, led to a series of deep and complex works which emphasize the potential of change that lies in everything." (Written by Sarah Crown)