Hanne Barr, Animus
B Store, 24a Savile Row, London W1S 3PR
20th August – 8th September 2007

“Mythology is a rendition of forms through which the formless Form of forms can be known.  An inferior object is presented as the representation, or habitation, of a superior.  The love or attachment felt for the inferior is a function actually of one’s potential establishment in the superior.”
Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology

Animus explores the idea of a spurious ancient mythology; an order at the beginnings of human experience emerging from imagined pre-historical accounts for the phenomena of the universe – nature, death and dreaming. Floating in an inky black nothingness prior to any cosmogonical theory, nightmarish souls, terrible yet innocent, inhabit a realm that exists before time and before matter.

The sculptures and prints in this exhibition document these fictitious forms; the beings of an apocryphal mythology existing outside the reality of their imaginary inferiors. The relics which these beings inspire occupy a different stratum, removed from the crypto-anthropological observer of this imagined cult of a dark and ancient subconscious.

The make-up of made-up:  the image of the animus, both silent and observing, appears in a space between the frame and total darkness, where form is given to the intangible and the tangible is given form.

Hanne Barr is a London-based artist and illustrator. She trained at Central Saint Martins School of Art graduating in 2001.


For more information see her website www.hannebarr.co.uk or contact her by email at info@hannebarr.co.uk.